Private equity buyouts arouse intense interest among investors and business owners as well as policymakers and politicians, but the difficulty of assembling the data needed for a systematic evaluation makes assessing their effects hard. This column uses data on thousands of buyouts in the US to examine the effects on employment, job reallocation, productivity, and worker compensation. The findings suggest that the effects differ greatly by type of buyout, with the credit conditions at the time of buyout, and with the post-buyout evolution of credit conditions and the macroeconomy, casting doubt on the efficacy of ‘one-size-fits-all’ policy prescriptions for private equity.