Using a new trademark-based product market competition measure and a novel trademark-merger dataset over the period 1983-2016, we show that companies facing greater product market competition are more likely to be acquirers. We further show that postmerger, compared to their non-acquiring peers,...

We examine how private equity investments affect employee perceptions of job quality. Leveraged buyouts (LBOs) lead to job satisfaction declines for long-tenured, low-skill, and less-educated workers. High-skill workers and managers are less impacted overall but report larger declines in...