I'm sitting at home this evening reading work documents (yes, I'm a boring man) when I thought of a good topic for the thesis of an aspiring Ph.D. candidate. 

My idea is what are the post-IPO (initial public offering) returns of companies that were taken private by private equity partnerships and then floated back onto the public markets, particularly over a longer period of time such as two or three years after the companies were re-floated on the market.

Generally, IPOs underperform the market two years after the company becomes a publicly traded company.  It would be interesting to know if companies that were taken private then re-floated a few years later outperformed or underperformed both the market and the universe of IPOs.