This study examines how the human capital of spinout founders and the performance of parent firms affect the success of spinouts by using a matched employer-employee dataset of new ventures covering 7 SIC 1-digit sectors in the United States. Our data cover 29,100 spinouts and 379,800 new...

We examine the role of human capital in employees’ decisions to leave their parent firms andform spinouts. Using a large sample of individuals who formed spinouts in manufacturing industries between 1992 and 2005, and their co-workers who did not, we find that after controlling for age,...

We study the relationship between the enforceability of covenants not to compete (CNCs) and employee mobility and wages. We exploit a 2015 CNC ban for technology workers in Hawaii and find that this ban increased mobility by 11% and new-hire wages by 4%. We supplement the Hawaii evaluation with...

This paper examines how the enforceability of noncompete covenants affects the creation, growth, and survival of spinouts and other new entrants. The impact of noncompete enforceability on new firms is ambiguous, since noncompetes reduce knowledge leakage but impose hiring costs. However, we...

Many of a firm’s most important informational or relational resources are at risk of diffusion to its competitors because they are embedded in the firm’s human capital. Using novel firm- and worker-level data, we present descriptive evidence on the adoption of and outcomes associated with...

This note provides details about the construction of the NBER Patent Data-BR concordance, and is intended for researchers planning to use this concordance. In addition to describing the matching process used to construct the concordance, this note provides a discussion of the benefits and...