The effects of private equity buyouts on employment, productivity, and job reallocation vary tremendously with macroeconomic and credit conditions, across private equity groups, and by type of buyout. We reach this conclusion by examining the most extensive database of U.S. buyouts ever compiled, encompassing thousands of buyout targets from 1980 to 2013 and millions of control firms. Employment shrinks 12% over two years after buyouts of publicly listed firms—on average, and relative to control firms—but expands 15% after buyouts of privately held firms. Postbuyout productivity gains at target firms are large on average and much larger yet for deals executed amid tight credit conditions. A postbuyout tightening of credit conditions or slowing of gross domestic product growth curtails employment growth and intrafirm job reallocation at target firms. We also show that buyout effects differ across the private equity groups that sponsor buyouts, and these differences persist over time at the group level. Rapid upscaling in deal flow at the group level brings lower employment growth at target firms. We relate these findings to theories of private equity that highlight agency problems at portfolio firms and within the private equity industry itself.

We examine how institutional saving mechanisms influence retirement saving decisions under bounded rationality and income risk. Using a life-cycle experiment with habit formation and loss aversion, we test mandatory and voluntary binding savings under deterministic and stochastic income. Voluntary commitment improves saving performance only when income is predictable; under uncertainty, it fails to improve performance. Mandatory savings do not raise total saving, as participants reduce voluntary contributions. These results emphasize the role of income smoothing in enabling behavioral interventions to improve long-term financial outcomes.

We study the effects of Tax Authority (IRS) attention on a firm’s financial reporting. We explore whether firms institute a higher degree of accounting conservatism in response to IRS monitoring. Using data on IRS acquisition of public firms’ 10-K financial disclosures to proxy for IRS attention, we find that when firms are under IRS attention, they tend to initiate higher levels of unconditional and, to some extent, conditional accounting conservatism. We alleviate some of the endogeneity concerns by using pre- and post-IRS attention environments between the treated group (firms with IRS attention) and a propensity score that matches the control group of firms (no IRS attention). These results withstand several robustness tests and subsample analyses.