This entry pertains to the Columbia PE Conference held March 5-6, 2026, organized by my colleagues Mike Ewens and Emmanuel Yimfor.
This is a conference that I look forward to every year, especially now that I spend more time thinking about the expansion of private markets to the broader masses through my paper. This year I unfortunately had to miss a few sessions due to teaching — midterm season for Columbia MBAs! — but caught enough to come away with a lot to think about.
Blake Jackson (Florida) presented “How do Barbarians Get to the Gates? Private Equity Careers, Styles, and Returns.” I met Blake on the job market but did not get to see the presentation, so it was good to see it in person. The core finding is that a large share of cross-partner heterogeneity in PE deal outcomes traces back to where partners started their careers and who they worked under early on. Particularly impressive is the data work where he uses the Wayback Machine to reconstruct career histories in a setting where this kind of information doesn't sit neatly in any one database.
The question I kept returning to: is this imprinting, or deliberate apprenticeship? I do think the distinction matters: imprinting is passive, as you absorb how your boss operates and replicate it. Apprenticeship is intentional knowledge transfer, closer to what Garicano and Raya document in their works. The mechanisms have different implications, particularly as AI starts to change how junior professionals learn on the job. My guess is it's some mix of both, but the paper would be sharper if it tried to separate them.
Simon Mayer (Carnegie Mellon) presented “Private Equity Continuation Vehicles: A Model of Strategic Asset Transfers.” This is an optimal contracting paper on continuation vehicles — the transactions where a GP moves assets from a maturing fund into a new vehicle rather than returning capital to LPs.
Giorgia Piacentino's discussion was, as usual, exceptionally clear. There were some comments about the ratio of results to assumptions, but the one that particularly resonated with me is the comment about the “Raison D’etre of CVs” where the authors currently develop a theory of CVs but do not compare to any alternatives. And this seems particularly important, especially given the recent explosion in these vehicles even though technically firms could have done it many decades ago.
Josh Lerner (HBS) presented “How Do Emerging Markets Investors Make Decisions? Evidence from Venture Capital and Private Equity.” Using survey and reduced form evidence, the paper documents a significant growth in GPs headquartered in emerging market countries, distinct investment styles among EM investors, and lower absolute returns that look better on a relative basis.
There are a lot of open questions the paper gestures at but doesn't fully resolve, which I think is honest given how early this topic is. My instinct was to reach for the literature on multinational firms and ask what's genuinely new here. Josh's answer, which I found convincing: the exit constraint is different, and governance is different. Those two features together make this a distinct enough setting that the MNC parallels likely only go so far.
Alexander Ljungqvist presented “Quietly Ahead: The Diverging R&D Productivity of Public and Private Firms.” The paper’s central claim is that the identity of the marginal innovator has shifted over the past century from public to private firms. The authors measure this by comparing the value of patents produced by each type.
I thought it was thought-provoking in the way that good historical papers are and also made me think about how firms are adapting to the current technological moment, where that shift might be accelerating further. There was also some discussion at the end about the Kogan et al. (2017) patent value measure. For that measure, the key question is whether it's better suited for cross-sectional comparisons holding time fixed, or for comparisons over time holding patent type fixed. Those are different use cases and the measure may not perform equally well in both.
Young Soo Jang presented “The Lending Technology of Direct Lenders in Private Credit,” which uses new data to document interesting facts. One main point of the paper is that direct lenders — the most popular form of private credit — remain more limited in scope than the growth of private credit might suggest, even within the middle market. The discussant pushed the authors to sharpen the narrative, which felt right.