Acquired employees versus hired employees: Retained or turned over?

Research Summary Thousands of acquisitions of technology companies result in the de facto hiring of myriad individuals into new employers every year. We analyze the effects of such deals on acquired employee (AE) retention relative to a matched sample of directly hired employees (HEs) joining the same acquirers in the same year. In a dataset with all acquisitions of VC‐backed companies in the previous two decades paired to over 30 million...