Identification of sub-industry types of PE / VC deals

Advisor: Yichun Dong (please contact yichun.dong[at]tum.de)

Start: ASAP

We are here to present you with the opportunity to be part of a bigger project while finishing your master thesis under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Reiner Braun at the same time.

Research Question and Background

The question you will be focused on is to identify, in each PE / VC acquisition deal, which sub-industry the target firm is operating in, based on its end-product descriptions. 

In most past PE/VC researches, the common practice to acquire this information has been reading off the ‘Industry’ tab in datasets from commercial data providers. However, it can be crude and imprecise. What we intend to do is to apply textual analysis on product description paragraphs from the target firm websites and directly extract this information. 

A similar idea was applied to public company profiles in Hoberg-Phillips (2010). For more details, please refer to this website: https://hobergphillips.tuck.dartmouth.edu/

Your Task and Support

In this thesis, your task is to provide us with ready-to-go raw text materials, and do some first-step analyses. You will be provided with a list of target companies that was involved in PE/VC deals. For each company, you go to the company website, find the relevant information and fill the columns in the excel file we provide. On top, you are encouraged to further explore the data you collect. Your results will be cross-checked with those from your colleagues and will hence be evaluated in a fair way.

In this process, you will be involved in developing new research questions, laying the foundation for a series of projects and potentially get a first experience of textual analysis (if it fits your interest).

If you are interested in joining or have further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me at Yichun.dong[at]tum.de.