We found that over the past 15 years, private equity has outperformed both the S&P 500 and the MSCI World. There is a decreasing edge over public equities that can be partly explained by the increasing multiples and risk that PE funds assume.n While public equities are prone to large swings, private companies were able to conduct business as usual and operate without the public pressure that frequently resulted in ad-hoc strategic changes detrimental to company's long-term per-formance.n Geographic specialization adds no value and has no impact on the performance of buyouts. But the current study supports the outperformance of industry-specialized funds. Industry specialization results in higher return multiples.