Academic writing can be … challenging, to put it politely, with papers offering headlines that are obscure. However, sometimes the title of a study provides more than a narrow technical description of an investigation.

In the case of a new paper from Timothy Riddiough, a professor of real estate and urban land economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and doctoral student Da Li, the name of the paper is almost clickbait in its simplicity: "Persistently Poor Performance in Private Equity Real Estate." The abstract is as stark and harsh:

"We compare Buyout (BO), Venture Capital (VC), and Private Equity Real Estate (RE) funds. RE funds underperform BO and VC, as well as the public market alternative. In RE, worse-performing fund managers survive at a high rate. They are also susceptible to diseconomies of fund scale, with no skill-based persistence to offset the negative scale effects. Analysis of noisy fund manager selection indicates that RE investors are not disadvantaged relative to BO and VC. LP investors in RE funds seem to be optimizing something other than, or in addition to, investment return when selecting fund managers."