Johan Ljungkvist

I am a PhD Student in Finance at the Stockholm School of Economics and my research interests are in Empirical Corporate Finance. I have a particular focus on Private Equity, studying the operational effects of leveraged buyouts.

I am on the academic job market and will be available for interviews at the European Job Market for Economists and the AFA/ASSA virtual conferences. 

Job market paper: Private Equity and Labor Regulations

Abstract: Leveraged buyouts (LBOs) are often associated with significant restructuring of the labor force. Little is known about how buyout firms respond to regulatory frictions that impose costs on labor adjustments. Using a novel cross-country dataset of buyout portfolio companies headquartered in Europe, I study how buyout investment responds to employment protection legislation (EPL). I examine two distinct stages of the LBO investment process - the process of acquiring new target firms, and conditional on acquisition, the restructuring process itself. First, I find that buyout firms are less likely to target firms in countries with stricter labor regulations. Second, leveraging within-deal variation to compare subsidiaries across countries, I find that portfolio companies grow employment and fixed assets less in countries with stricter EPL. This is consistent with a relative downsizing of operations. Further, these effects are concentrated in the subset of buyout deals executed by Anglo-American buyout firms. Overall, my results suggest that labor regulations influence the nature of LBOs.