HEC in the press

The body of data demonstrating that diversity improves performance has been growing in recent years, but, until now, there hasn’t been a close look at how gender diversity in private equity teams affects the performance of investments. Oliver Gottschalg, a professor at HEC Paris, studied performance at the PE deal level, and the results are compelling: Private equity investment committees that include women produce higher returns and lower risk of failure than all-male counterparts. 

A group of students from HEC Paris have entered the Hult Prize with a project to provide meaningful jobs for 10,000 young people in Africa. Louisa Kuehme, Alessandra Mantovani and Ludivine Berouard share their story in a student diary published in Times Higher Education. 

Investment committee teams with at least one female member perform better and have a lower risk of failure than all-male teams, a study has found. 

HEC Paris and MVision Private Equity Advisers analysed nearly 2.500 buyout deals executed by 51 GPs within 220 funds in North America and Europe. The research looked at the gender balance on investment committee teams across three metrics: alpha, total value to paid-in multiple and internal rate of return. 

Alberto Alemanno, EU law professor at HEC Paris, explains on France 24 how the EU top jobs nominations affect Europe.

Why do some firms seem to attract more media disapproval than others when it comes to CEO compensation perceived as excessive? And, crucially, do CEO attempts at philanthropy of the kind seen recently after the Notre Dame fire in Paris, ward off such media onslaughts to the former – or catalyze them?

HEC Paris strategy and business policy professor Georg Wernicke responds to both these questions in an op-ed published on Forbes. 

Parliament has been building its authority lately. Accepting the Council’s decision for Commission President reverses that, writes HEC Paris EU law Professor Alberto Alemanno, in an op-ed for Bloomberg. 

For certain industries, Europe is the place to be. Madeleine Chabot went to HEC Paris because she was working in luxury goods, whose global capital is Paris. Having studied there, she is considering staying. “Initially, my plans were really to go straight back to the U.S. and to have a victory back to New York and this is really to solidify my stronghold in luxury. Over the past few months, the plan has gotten actually a little bit more flexible and I’m really open to staying in Europe, at least for the short term.”, she says, in an interview for Poets & Quants. 

Calling it “Impact Tomorrow,” HEC Paris has launched a €200 million, five-year campaign that will be a major step in the school’s plan to become completely self-financing by 2050 — a goal that is “in keeping with leading Anglo-Saxon academic institutions,” the school announced Monday (June 24).

Private equity has long had the reputation of being a male-dominated industry, but a small but growing number of investment firms are making gender diversity a priority.

Now a new study quantifies how having greater gender diversity could be an advantage to firms by raising their returns and reducing deal making failure rates. The study, conducted by French business school HEC Paris and MVision Private Equity Advisers found that deal teams that included women produced on average internal rates of return 12% higher than deals led by all-male teams.

In Europe, the regulation that followed the financial crisis has made students with technical and legal knowledge a prized asset, says Olivier Bossard, Professor of the MSc finance programme at HEC Paris business school. “There is a growing demand for our students who can calculate and communicate risks,” he says, in an interview for the Financial Times, including at banks and consulting firms.