Are Mergers and Acquisitions Accompanied by Increasing Recourse to THS employment? A French perspective

This paper focuses on variations in employment of temporary help services (THS) employment when firms face mergers & acquisitions (M&As). We use an original French dataset in which the stock of temporary workers is isolated from that of other workers. With descriptive statistics, we observe that the number of temporary workers increases in acquiring firms. We use matching difference-in-differences estimators to check whether the use of THS employment increases after M&As. The results show that M&As are accompanied by increasing recourse to THS employment. The effects are quite strong for 1999 and 2000. The effect is weaker for 2001 because from this year the use of THS employment decreased for the first time since the beginning of the 1980's in France.