Reiner Braun is Professor of Entrepreneurial Finance at TUM School of Management, Technische Universität München (TUM), where he has held the Chair of Entrepreneurial Finance since 2015. He is Scientific Director at the Center for Entrepreneurial and Financial Studies (CEFS).
Professor Braun’s research focuses on private equity, venture capital, and the application of quantitative and AI-based methods to private markets. His work has been published in leading journals including the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, Research Policy, the Review of Finance, and the Journal of Business Venturing. He is Co-Founder and Chairman of QFT Capital GmbH, a university spin-off applying quantitative methods to private markets.
He serves on the Advisory Board of KfW Capital and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Center for Digital Technology and Management (CDTM, TUM/LMU). He is a member of the National Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) and a Research Fellow at the Private Equity Research Consortium (PERC). Prior to his academic career, he served as Executive Assistant to the Group Chief Investment Officer (CIO) at Allianz Investment Management SE.
Size, returns, and value: Do private equity firms allocate capital according to manager skill? (with Nils Dorau, Tim Jenkinson, and Daniel Urban; accepted at the Journal of Finance)
Using a novel dataset linking PE deals to individual managers, we document evidence of manager skill in generating net present value (NPV). While relative returns decline with scale, NPV persists and even increases. Skilled managers are entrusted with more capital and achieve better labor market outcomes, and approximately 40% of NPV is attributable to internal capital allocation decisions.
Limited Partners versus Unlimited Machines: AI and the Performance of Private Equity Funds (with Borja Fernandez Tamayo, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Ludovic Phalippou, and Natalia Sigrist)
Using a proprietary dataset of 395 PE fund prospectuses, we analyze fund performance and fundraising success with econometric methods and machine learning techniques. PE fund performance is unrelated to quantitative information such as prior performance. Measures of fundraising success, in contrast, are correlated to most fund characteristics but are not related to future performance.
Consequences of Unfunded Capital Commitments: Evidence from University Endowments (with Mark Jansen and Ludovic Phalippou)
Using hand-collected data from 323 U.S. university endowments, we show that unfunded commitments are large, procyclical, and weakly offset by cash and credit lines. During the 2008 Financial Crisis, endowments with high commitments and low liquidity coverage underperformed peers, cut spending, and declined in rankings.
