Kyiv School of Economics invites to the Academic seminar "Can Private Equity Funds Act as Strategic Buyers? Evidence from Buy-and-Build Strategies" by Vadym Volosovych, Erasmus University Rotterdam. 

The seminar will be held online on Thursday, November 5, at 17:00 (Kyiv time). 

About the speaker. Vadym Volosovych is an Associate Professor of International Finance at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He received his PhD in economics from the University of Houston (USA) in 2006, before he graduated from Kyiv School of Economics. His research is in the fields of international business (firm productivity, competitiveness, multinationals), corporate finance (private equity, leveraged buyouts, activities of institutional investors), and international finance (international investments; financial side of economic integration; micro and macro aspects of economic fluctuations; history of globalization). Volosovych is an Associate Editor of Visnyk of the National Bank of Ukraine and has been a visiting scholar at the National Bank of Ukraine, the research department of the International Monetary Fund, Washington D.C., and an assistant professor of economics at Florida Atlantic University (USA). 

Abstract. By holding assets longer and increasingly focusing on growth strategies private equity firms enter the territory of strategic buyers. In one such strategy, a private equity firm buys a company and then builds on that “platform” through add-on acquisitions.We ask whether such serial (buy-and-build) acquisition strategies deliver operating synergies, as expected from strategic buyers, or rather are a form of “window-dressing.” We collect a sample of buy-and-build strategies from seven major European markets and find that the profitability of these strategies improves more than that of the comparable strategies, constructed by us from stand-alone companies. We analyze a number of operating outcomes across various strategy sub-types and confirm that these operational improvements are consistent with the synergy interpretation.

This seminar is enabled by the financial support from Sweden.