CEO Markets: Public vs Private Firms

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The Institute for Corporate Governance Public Lecture Series:

“CEO Markets: Public vs Private Firms”

Dirk Jenter (London School of Economics and ECGI)

Steven Kaplan (Chicago Booth and ECGI)

Online lecture

Thursday, 14 September 2023

12:00 – 13:15 EDT | 18:00 – 19:15 CEST

Organised by

Jun Yang (Kelley School of Business, Indiana University)
 

About the Event:

Professor Steven Kaplan (Chicago Booth and ECGI) and Professor Dirk Jenter (London School of Economics and ECGI) held a fireside chat for the seventeenth lecture in this series on 14 September 2023.

Among larger U.S. companies (enterprise value greater than $1 billion) purchased by private equity firms between 2010 and 2016, almost 75% of the new CEOs are external hires with 67% being complete outsiders (Gomper, Kaplan and Mukharlyamov 2022). These results are strikingly different from studies that look at public companies, at which 72% of new CEOs in S&P 500 companies are internal promotions and 80% are internal promotions, former executives or board members (Cziraki and Jenter 2021). Why are the public company and private-equity portfolio company CEO results so different? How important is firm-specific human capital to private and public companies?

Steven Kaplan conducts research on private equity, venture capital, entrepreneurial finance, corporate governance and corporate finance. He has published papers in a number of academic and business journals. Kaplan is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is the co-creator of the Kaplan-Schoar PME (Public Market Equivalent) private equity benchmarking approach. A Fortune Magazine article referred to him as "probably the foremost private equity scholar in the galaxy.” BusinessWeek named him one of the top 12 business school teachers in the country. Professor Kaplan co-founded the entrepreneurship program at Booth. With his students, he helped start Booth’s business plan competition, the New Venture Challenge (NVC), which has included over 800 companies that have raised almost $1 billion and created over $8 billion in value including GrubHub, Braintree/Venmo and Simple Mills. Kaplan serves on the board of Morningstar and several fund and company advisory boards. He received his AB, summa cum laude, in Applied Mathematics and Economics from Harvard College and earned a PhD in Business Economics from Harvard University.

Dirk Jenter is a Professor of Finance at the London School of Economics and was previously a faculty member at Stanford and MIT. He is a Research Associate of CEPR, a Research Member of ECGI, and a former Research Fellow of NBER. His research focuses on corporate governance, the selection and compensation of top executives, mergers and acquisitions, and interactions of firms with investors and capital markets. His work has been published in all top finance journals, has garnered several research awards, and has been featured in, among others, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Finance and has been an Associate Editor of the Review of Financial Studies. He has an M.Phil. in Economics from the University of Cambridge and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Business Economics from Harvard University.

The public lecture series is organised by Institute for Corporate Governance (ICG) in partnership with the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University and ECGI.