Private equity buyouts have sparked debates among labor unions and worker representatives on how they affect workers. This chapter provides an overview of academic evidence on how private equity buyouts affect workers. We review the theoretical reasons why employees could be affected and then...

Using linked employer-employee data from Sweden, a difference-in-difference approach, and 201 private equity buyouts undertaken between 1998 and 2004, we show that unemployment risk declines and labor income increases for employees in the wake of a private equity buyout. Unemployment risk...

Although private equity firms are often criticized for layoffs, little evidence exists regarding which employees lose their jobs and why. We argue that explanations for the job polarization process can also explain layoffs after buyouts. Buyouts reduce agency problems, which triggers automation,...

The media often cast foreign private equity firms as villains who gamble with local jobs. We use detailed registry data from Sweden to show that foreign buyouts have not affected workers' labor market outcomes. But domestic buyouts have. They have increased unemployment incidence by a fifth,...

The world is in the midst of a new wave of privatization, with record dollar amounts raised in both developed and developing countries.Using rich Swedish registry data covering two decades from the mid-1990s, we show that privatizations increased unemployment incidence by almost a fifth, and...

Do foreign venture capitalists help the domestic economy, or hamper it by slowing down growth, potentially moving economic activity away? This paper addresses this long-standing policy question by examining the differential effects of US venture capital investments on the growth of Swedish...

Zum 1. Januar 1997 wurde im Bauhauptgewerbe ein Mindestlohn eingeführt, der bis heute besteht. Die vorliegende Studie fasst verschiedene Ergebnisse zu den Folgen dieser Mindestlohnregelung zusammen. In Ostdeutschland war die Betroffenheit durch den Mindestlohn zum Zeitpunkt der Einführung...

We study the distributional consequences of monetary policy-induced credit supply in the labor market. To this end, we construct a novel dataset that links worker employment histories to firm financials and banking relationships in Germany. Firms in relationships with banks that are more exposed...

On January 1st, 1997, minimum wages were introduced in the German main construction sector. We examine the effects of this wage regulation on various aspects of the labour market of this sector, particularly the effects on wages and employment. In East Germany, at the time of its introduction,...