Using the extent to which firms rely on knowledge workers, we find significant unequal distribution of economic gains across workers and firms after non-compete enforcement weakens. While lower enforceability may expose firms to greater hold-up problems, it incentivizes workers to invest in...

We investigate the importance of client relationships in the financial advisory industry. We exploit firm-level variation in adoption of the Broker Protocol, which enabled clients to follow their advisers to member firms without fear of litigation. We show that advisers' ability to maintain...

This paper examines how labor frictions affect investment rate and new firm entry. Using matched employee-employer data from LinkedIn, I first show that increases in the enforceability of non-compete agreements lead to widespread declines in employee departures across seniority levels, driven by...

This paper analyzes the National Labor Relations Board's recent Purple Communications decision. There, the Obama Board found Purple Communication's restrictions on employee use of its email system violated the National Labor Relations Act as employees were authorized to use the employer email...

Under traditional agency law doctrine, employees are agents of their employers and owe an agent's concomitant fiduciary duties. Employers, in turn, are merely principals and have no corresponding fiduciary duties. A new wave of thinking has unsettled this approach by concluding that only...

Employment at-will is the default rule of termination for the vast majority of American employment relationships. The rule creates a presumption — a strong one — that the contract for employment allows either party to terminate the contract at any point in time. Since its inception, this...

The labour market in the cross-border areas has always triggered an evident interest from local and national authorities, but also on the part of the institutions of the European Union or of the Council of Europe. However, the policies and measures created in frontier areas did not produce...

Features of the ‘fourth industrial revolution', such as platforms, AI and machine learning, pose challenges for the application of regulatory rules, in the area of labour law as elsewhere. However, today's digital technologies have their origins in earlier phases of industrialisation, and do...

Agreements not to compete are generally an anathema to free market advocates. Independent profit maximization is one of the fundamental assumptions of the neoclassical economic model and necessary to its conclusion that markets yield results that are Paraeto efficient. Consistent with this...