Private Equity and Employment

Steven Davis, John Haltiwanger, Ron Jarmin, Josh Lerner and Javier Miranda

Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies

Abstract: Private equity critics claim that leveraged buyouts bring huge job losses. To investigate this claim, we construct and analyze a new dataset that covers U.S. private equity transactions from 1980 to 2005. We track 3,200 target firms and their 150,000 establishments before and after acquisition, comparing outcomes to controls similar in terms of industry, size, age, and prior growth. Relative to controls, employment at target establishments declines 3 percent over two years post buyout and 6 percent over five years. The job losses are concentrated among public-to-private buyouts, and transactions involving firms in the service and retail sectors. But target firms also create more new jobs at new establishments, and they acquire and divest establishments more rapidly. When we consider these additional adjustment margins, net relative job losses at target firms are less than 1 percent of initial employment. In contrast, the sum of gross job creation and destruction at target firms exceeds that of controls by 13 percent of employment over two years. In short, private equity buyouts catalyze the creative destruction process in the labor market, with only a modest net impact on employment. The creative destruction response mainly involves a more rapid reallocation of jobs across establishments within target firms.

Keywords: Private Equity; Buyouts; Leverage; Job Loss; Job Creation; Employment Dynamics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D22 G34 L25 M54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51 pages
Date: 2008-03, Revised 2011-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2008/CES-WP-08-07R.pdf Revised version, 2011 (application/pdf)
https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2008/CES-WP-08-07.pdf First version, 2008 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
Working Paper: Private Equity and Employment (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cen:wpaper:08-07

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dawn Anderson ().