My class in private equity and venture capital doesn’t know it yet, but I think I might have them read Harvard Law School’s John Coates’ new empirical paper on the effects of ownership on M&A, or at least some important sections of it. I’ve just been through it and think it’s terrific, with robust implications for differences between private and public targets. (Plus, in the context of my class, it’s a good follow-on the some material from Larry Ribstein’s new book The Rise of the Uncorporation.) You can find the full abstract and the paper at SSRN, but the one-sentence description is: The paper “shows in a variety of ways how important M&A for private targets is to the economy, how different private target M&A is from public target M&A, and how important law is in creating those differences.”
(My class will have lots and lots of time to read, as class has been canceled and school closed – here in DC, the university hasn’t been open since last Thursday! So I assume that my students are virtuously all snuggled up with texts on private equity, reading aloud with furrowed brows and cups of hot cocoa in one hand and yellow highlighter in the other.)
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