| Summary: | Large amounts of money are transferred each year in corporate acquisitions that shape our economies. Most of those transactions are private and thus have no market price. When investment bankers value private companies by comparing them to their public peers generally a private company discount is applied. However, the actual research results regarding the topic are rather scarce and inaccurate to some extent. Therefore, I seek to examine the different characteristics that determine the private company dis-count. I collect acquisition information from Bureau van Dijk’s Orbis database and to-gether with data gathered from other sources, I form Huber regression models that study private company discounts and variables that affect those discounts. My results confirm the existence of private company discount, while I am also able to make inter-esting findings that explain discount variation in different environments. I note that during times of strong equity markets the discounts are actually bigger, because the positive reaction in multiples of listed companies exceeds the gain in the private acqui-sition multiples. I also note that private company discount increases during times of tight liquidity.
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