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 whether restricting these acquisitions would promote innovation.

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 household 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-hiring rather than hiring the team directly? 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 acqui-hired teams remain more intact and produce more innovation than comparable directly hired teams. COVID-19 disruptions to in-person coordination reduce the acqui-hire advantage in joint invention and shift firms toward direct hiring, providing causal evidence for this explanation. However, the same acquisition that preserves these gains also redirects the team’s inventions toward the acquirer’s technology. Patents closer to that technology receive fewer external citations, indicating less innovation diffusion. To evaluate whether restricting acqui-hires promotes innovation, I estimate a structural model of organizational choice and startup entry. Under an acqui-hire ban, partial-team hiring and lower startup entry reduce innovation production. The diffusion lost from fewer inventions outweighs the benefit of preserving independent innovation direction. Merger review should therefore recognize preserving gains from team complementarity as an innovation efficiency.

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