A new study has found that private equity buyers tend to pay less for companies than other publicly traded companies. Four professors have looked at cash deals for public companies from 1990 to 2005. They found that shareholders receive 55 percent more if a public firm makes the buy. More specifically, they found that the real difference is when the acquiring company has a low ownership stake in their own company. The logic is that the low-ownership managers are more prone to pursue deals that do not do as much damage to long-term shareholders value. If you look at high ownership managers versus private equity companies, there is no difference in the premium paid. So this is good news in a sense for the private equity industry, which has battled some PR issues.

For more:
- here's the New York Times article
- more private equity news