The Short-Term Impact of Mergers and Acquisitions on Employment : a French Data Analysis (1996-2005). The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of takeovers on employment by using French data from MDST Survey and Citrus Survey available over the 1996 to 2005 period. We merged three enterprise databases (MDST, Citrus and Suse) to provide a sample where firms’ characteristics, the involvement in takeover activity and financial links between firms are available. We followed the Brow and Médoff [1988] and analyzed the employment level of combined acquired and acquiring firms. Then we estimated the short term effect of takeovers on employment by using a selection regression model. The results indicate that mergers and acquisitions have...