In our paper, Corporate Governance of LBOs: The Role of Boards, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we study whether the success of private equity-backed firms is due to their superior corporate governance or instead due to financial engineering. We focus in particular on the role of boards in LBOs and look at changes in the board when a public company is taken private by a private equity group.

We construct a new data set, which follows the board composition and financial figures of all public to private transactions that took place in the UK between 1998 and 2003. Out of these 142 transactions, 88 have private equity sponsors and are thus identified as LBOs. The remaining transactions are either pure MBOs or other types, and are used as benchmarks. We track each company two or three years before the announcement of the buyout until the exit of private equity investors or until 2010, whichever is earlier.

We find that when a company goes private, fundamental shifts in board size and composition take place. The board size decreases on average by 15% and the presence of outside directors is drastically reduced, as they are replaced by individuals employed by the private equity sponsors. We also find evidence that the board size and presence of LBO sponsors on the board depend on the “style” or preferences of the private equity firm. Overall, the boards become more in line with the type of boards that the corporate governance literature would identify as exhibiting better corporate governance. We then set to find out what role these boards play.

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