PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Mihai Precup TI - The Exit Behavior of Private Equity Firms in Eastern Europe: <em>An Empirical Analysis of the Main Exit Strategies</em> AID - 10.3905/jpe.2019.1.090 DP - 2019 Aug 30 TA - The Journal of Private Equity PG - 83--95 VI - 22 IP - 4 4099 - https://pm-research.com/content/22/4/83.short 4100 - https://pm-research.com/content/22/4/83.full AB - The author examines the two main exit routes preferred by private equity funds, initial public offerings (IPOs) and mergers and acquisitions (M&amp;A), using quarterly data for Eastern European countries and covering the period 2000–2014. This article follows the work of Black and Gilson (1998), who confirmed the existence of a positive correlation between the number of IPOs (in year t) and the willingness of institutional investors to allocate funds to private equity firms (in year t + 1). Additionally, this article studies M&amp;A as a second exit strategy for private equity investors by mobilizing the economic techniques that are used in time series analysis. The results show that Eastern European private equity firms prefer M&amp;A exits followed by IPOs. The Granger causality test shows the existence of a unidirectional causality of the number of M&amp;A to the volume of private equity investments in Eastern Europe.TOPICS: Private equity, emerging, statistical methods, performance measurement