DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Now, some companies in need of restructuring become targets for private equity firms. And one private equity firm, Bain Capital, has gotten plenty of attention because Mitt Romney once ran it.
NPR's John Ydstie evaluates the economic performance of private equity.
JOHN YDSTIE, BYLINE: Here's what private equity firms like Bain Capital do. First, they go out and find a few large investors, usually pension funds, university endowments and possibly wealthy individuals. Then, says Ohio State professor Steven Davidoff, they take that money, borrow a lot more, and buy companies - usually companies that are troubled or undervalued.
STEVEN DAVIDOFF: And they buy them in the hopes that they can increase the value of the companies, and sell them at a fantastic profit.
YDSTIE: And Mitt Romney made a fortune doing just that. He also provided big returns for his investors. The problem is that in an effort to make companies more valuable, Romney also shut down factories and cost people jobs. That led one of his opponents, Texas Governor Rick Perry, to suggest Romney was a vulture capitalist.
RICK PERRY: There's a real difference between venture capitalism and vulture capitalism. Venture capitalism, we like; vulture capitalism, no.
YDSTIE: Another candidate, former Speaker Newt Gingrich, characterized what Romney did at Bain Capital this way...
NEWT GINGRICH: And those of us who believe that in fact, the whole goal of investment is entrepreneurship and job creation would find it pretty hard to justify rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company, leaving behind 1,700 families without a job.
STEVEN N. KAPLAN: That's ridiculous. Looting a company, and destroying a company, does not create value.
YDSTIE: That's Steven N. Kaplan. He's a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and he's an expert on the private equity industry.
KAPLAN: At the end of the day, in order to make money, you have to sell the company to somebody. And if the company has been looted and is unproductive, nobody is going to buy it.
YDSTIE: The public relations problem for private equity capitalists at firms like Bain Capital, KKR and Blackstone is that they are the agents of the creative destruction part of capitalism. They aim to take over underperforming firms, and operate them more efficiently. Steven Davidoff, who worked on merger and acquisition deals as a lawyer before becoming a professor at Ohio State, says there's no doubt that in that process, people can get hurt.
DAVIDOFF: Sometimes, operating them efficiently means that employees lose their jobs, plants are closed down, and companies are restructured.
YDSTIE: But there's no doubt that private equity firms create value. Professor Kaplan says research shows that from 1993 through 2008, money invested in private equity firms produced much higher returns than money invested in the stock market. And remember, that benefited many typical Americans through the public and private pension funds that are big investors in the industry. As for job gains and losses, professor Kaplan says the direct effects in companies taken over by private equity firms is pretty much a wash.
KAPLAN: Employment grows, maybe grows overall a tad less than other companies. And what you conclude from that is that the companies have become more productive.
YDSTIE: More productive firms need fewer workers for the same output. Of course, if the underperforming firms had not been taken over, they might have lost lots of jobs because they went out of business. Professor Davidoff says a more valid criticism of private equity firms is that their managers make use of a lucrative loophole to cut their tax bill.
DAVIDOFF: The barons of private equity are probably paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries, in terms of percentage.
YDSTIE: That's because they structure their compensation in a legal - but controversial - way so that they pay the capital gains rate of 15 percent, instead of the top rate on ordinary income of 35 percent. That's saved private equity managers billions in tax payments.
John Ydstie, NPR News, Washington.