The paper "How Persistent is Private Equity Performance? Evidence from Deal-Level Data" (see below) by Reiner Braun, Tim Jenkinson and Ingo Stoff was presented at the American Finance Association Meeting January 2016. The paper addresses persistence of returns as a critical issue for investors in their choice of private equity managers. The paper analyses buyout performance persistence in new ways, using a unique database containing cash-flow data on 13,523 portfolio company investments by 865 buyout funds. It focusses on unique realized deals and finds that persistence of fund managers has substantially declined as the private equity sector has matured and become more competitive. Private equity has, therefore, largely conformed to the pattern found in most other asset classes in which past performance is a poor predictor of the future. A working paper version can be found here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2314400