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This should/could be useful if/when we get back to the game of speculating on which publicly-listed businesses private equity might like to spend its hoarded billions. (Hat tip to the New Economist blog)

It’s an academic paper on a model that claims 83.4 per cent accuracy in predicting which companies will go private. What’s more, the authors, Sreedhar Bharath and Amy Dittmar from the University of Michigan, reckon they can identify near-dead-cert buyout candidates from the date the company first floats on a stock market.

Whizzy eh?

Ms Dittmar was due to speak at a Yale conference on Wednesday, discussing her research on public-to-privte transactions going all the way back to 1980.

The trick, apparently, is to use a variant of something called the Cox proportional hazard model, which is more commonly employed by researchers making bankruptcy predictions.

It looks like this:

But don’t ask - because we didn’t.

Coming soon: Sure fire St Leger predictor. Beat the bookies as well as the market!