Francesco Bollazzi

The internationalisation of the Portfolio Company is a key strategy used by Private Equity investors to create value and produce returns. In recent years, the focus onthe strategies for value-creation through operational improvement has become essential to achieve the exponential growth required to the Portfolio Company,given thelow multiples and themarket riskof leverage. In this paper, we define the key types of contribution that a Private Equity investor can provide in order to support the internationalisation process and their effects on the Portfolio Company performance. The research is based on a survey administered to 47 Private Equity fundmanagers, which covers156 dealsinvolving Italian companies. The results offer insight into the contribution tothe corporate governance, strategyand management that Private Equity provides in addition to the monetary support. The findings show that the non-financial support given toPortfolio Companies has a positive impact on the performance and that the most impactful contribution the Private Equity can give is the support to the relational network when the company strategy involves a Foreign Direct Investment.

The aim of this paper is to study the importance of the CSR on the performance of newly listed company at the Italian Stock Exchange with a focus on the impact of environmental, social and government responsibility, studying the performance of the first day of listing. The authors want to test if there is an advantage in terms of lower underpricing related to the preparation of a sustainability report, a document that allows to reduce the information asymmetry or if, contrarily, the factors related to ESG corporate responsibility are not considered, by the players of the listing process, under the offer price definition, but they are otherwise valued by the market, with the consequence of a higher underpricing for IPOs of the virtuous companies. The paper presents an empirical analysis on a sample of 84 IPOs admitted to Italian Stock Exchange between 2009 and 2015, in order to study the impact of ESG Corporate Responsibility on underpricing, analyzing the performance of the new companies listed. Through the univariate and multivariate analysis, the authors propose to show any relationship between performance and ESG Corporate Responsibility strategies.