Private equity activity is booming both in the US and Europe, especially in the form of leverage-buy-outs. The number of deals is increasing, as well as their sizes. Though a great amount of money is devoted to this asset class, it is still unclear whether they perform better than the market benchmark. There is a recent academic literature for the US that unveils the performance of this industry over the last two decades. A paper by Kaplan and Scholar * from MIT shows that: a) returns of LBOs