Zunda Winston Xu

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Finance at Stanford Graduate School of Business. My research interests are the economics of innovation and regulation. My job market paper studies why firms acquire startups to obtain their teams rather than hire the workers directly, and how restricting acqui-hires would affect aggregate innovation production and diffusion.

I am on the 2026–2027 academic job market. My CV is available here.

My broader research explores how firm boundaries and financial markets shape the way firms organize innovation and the technological directions they pursue, and how these choices affect knowledge diffusion. Regulation also shapes these choices by changing how resources are allocated. I study how regulators’ objectives and political incentives influence this process through policy design and enforcement, and how these regulatory decisions affect market structure, firm behavior, and consumer welfare.

Before Stanford, I received a master's in Computational Social Science from the University of Chicago. Prior to my Ph.D. studies, I also worked as a research fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

Job Market Paper

Acquiring to Hire: Team Complementarity and Innovation

Why do firms choose acqui-hires, acquisitions primarily to obtain a target’s team, when they could hire the workers directly instead? I argue that preserving gains from team complementarity that direct hiring would leave unrealized can justify the additional acquisition cost. I develop a novel deal-level measure identifying 12,271 acqui-hires and document that they keep target teams more intact and produce more inventions inside the acquirer than direct hiring of comparable teams. COVID-19 disruptions to work requiring in-person coordination reduce the acqui-hire advantage in joint invention and shift firms toward direct hiring, providing causal evidence for this explanation. However, acqui-hires may reduce innovation diffusion by redirecting the team’s inventions toward the acquirer’s technology, as patents closer to that technology receive fewer citations from other firms. To evaluate the net effect on aggregate innovation, I estimate a structural model and find that an acqui-hire ban would shift firms toward partial-team hiring, reducing invention through lost team complementarity. Merger review should therefore recognize that restricting acqui-hires can backfire, reducing both innovation production and diffusion despite the benefit of preserving startups’ independent innovation direction.

References

Amit Seru (Primary Advisor)
The Steven and Roberta Denning Professor of Finance
Stanford Graduate School of Business
aseru@stanford.edu

Nicholas Bloom
William D. Eberle Professor of Economics
Department of Economics, Stanford University
nbloom@stanford.edu

Greg Buchak
Associate Professor of Finance
Stanford Graduate School of Business
buchak@stanford.edu

Vikrant Vig
William R. Timken Professor and Professor of Finance
Stanford Graduate School of Business
vvig@stanford.edu