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,...

Estimates for the U.S. suggest that at least in some sectors productivity enhancing reallocation is the dominant factor in accounting for productivity growth. An open question, particularly relevant for developing countries, is whether reallocation is always productivity enhancing. It may be...

We use plant output and input prices to decompose the profit margin into four potential determinants of plant exit: productivity, demand shocks, mark-ups and input costs. We find that each of these market fundamentals are indeed important in explaining plant exit. Then, we use differences across...

We examine various channels through which trade liberalization affects aggregate productivity, exploiting tariff changes across sectors after the Colombian trade reform. An advantage of our analysis is that our TFP measure does not include demand and price effects. We find that higher...

Online appendix for the Review of Economic Dynamics article

We assess the impact, on workforce contract composition, employment adjustment dynamics and productivity, of a combination of changes in the Colombian labor legislation which increased firm’s ability of using contracts of a temporary nature, and posterior changes that increased the costs...

We analyze nonlinear adjustments of capital and labor using plant data from the Colombian Annual Manufacturing Survey, allowing for interdependence in adjustments of the two factors. We find nonlinear employment and capital adjustments. We also find that capital shortages reduce hiring, and...