Abstract

The migration of publicly-held companies to private status through use of private equity has been both lauded and lambasted. While agency theorists praise the public-to-private or PTP firm as being an efficient form of corporate governance, others suggest that going private allows owners and managers to extract, rather than add, value.We contribute by developing a categorization of the potential sources of value for the PTP firm. We analyze the effects of each source of value, and find that there are specific negative effects for non-equity stakeholders associated with several sources. Our analysis indicates that the degree to which value is added versus extracted will vary across firms; yet, all will tend to engage in some value extraction. Policy implications are discussed