Covenants not to compete (“noncompetes”) remain a controversial tool for employers to restrict employee post-employment mobility, particularly in an increasingly cross-jurisdictional business world. Amid the growing attention focused on the impact of noncompetes in legal and business...

This article addresses the struggle between hospitals and the nurses who are entrusted to care for the patients. In December, several thousand nurses staged a strike in hospitals throughout California. In New York, the threat of strikes recently passed, at least for now. Last month in Riverside...

In this paper, we analyze the careers from a sample of more than 1,000 top French chefs over more than twenty years and link it to the success or reputation of the restaurants where they have worked. This allows us to test what are the determinants of success but also to investigate the dynamics...

Existing research tends to depict contingent work either as having similar implications for firms and workers in all settings or as varying in its implications depending only on contingent workers' occupation or personal characteristics. In contrast, the author of this paper identifies...

The purpose of this paper is to ascertain how wages are being determined in China during the reform period. The paper focuses on the development of the regulatory framework since 1978 and proceeds by examining official regulations regarding labor market institutions and wage setting, and by...

Civil servants have a bad reputation of being lazy. However, citizens' personal experiences with civil servants appear to be significantly better. We develop a model of an economy in which workers differ in laziness and in public service motivation, and characterise optimal incentive contracts...

The traditional legal framework in the United States for the workplace was the master-servant doctrine, under which workers provide various services to their employers in exchange for benefits based on their status. That model has been largely supplanted by contract but, in recent decades,...

Scholars and other commentators widely assert that enforcement of contractual and other limitations on labor mobility deters innovation. Based on this view, federal and state legislators have taken, and continue to consider, actions to limit the enforcement of covenants not-to-compete in...

Many people apply for positions in different functional areas (e.g. marketing and finance) at the same organization. We study whether sending multiple applications to different functional areas increases or decreases applicants’ chance to be invited to a job interview. Our results from data of...

A growing number of employers are attempting to restrict worker mobility through Training Repayment Agreement Provisions (TRAPs) in addition to--or instead of--traditional noncompete agreements. Under TRAPs, a worker must pay to quit, purportedly for the cost of training. But many workers under...