Most research on the CEO labor market has studied public company CEOs while largely ignoring the market for CEOs in private equity funded companies. We fill this gap by studying the market for CEOs among larger U.S. companies (enterprise value greater than $1 billion) purchased by private equity...

With a large sample of public-to-private leveraged buyouts from 1980 to 2006, we find that LBO targets are equally likely to hold patents as other publicly-traded firms. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that LBOs reduce patent flows by one third. This reduction results from a...