Regulation of the employment contract is both wide spread and diverse. The diversity of regulation is surprising because it suggests that there is little consensus regarding optimal intervention into the labor market. This paper discusses several economic reasons why it may be efficient for...

The COVID-19 pandemic represented the emergence of an enormous, systemic, and largely un-anticipated economic risk. It upended entire industries on a global scale, shuttered millions of businesses by government order, and left millions more struggling to adapt to unforeseen and rapidly changing...

While post-employment restrictions may encourage firms to invest in employee skill and research and development (R&D), such restrictions may also under certain circumstances discourage employees from investing in their own human capital and work performance. The article reports the findings of...

The accompanying article argues that most sports agent laws subordinate athletes’ interests to those of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (“NCAA”), and that sports agent law needs to change to better protect both professional and amateur athletes. This article is timely in light...

The racial justice protests that engulfed the country after seeing a video of the appalling killing of a Black male, George Floyd, by a Minnesota police officer in 2020 has led to a tremendous number of questions about dealing with racial issues in policing. Similar concerns arose a little more...

Although it is widely understood that employers and employees are not equally situated, we fail adequately to account for this inequality in the law governing their relationship. We can best understand this inequality in terms of status, which encompasses one's level of income, leisure and...

Non-compete agreements help protect business investments by restricting worker mobility, thereby increasing firm incentives to invest. Yet, they could damage the efficacy of innovation investments that crucially rest on employee incentives. Exploiting staggered reforms of state non-compete...

This paper offers an eclectic survey of the political economy of labor regulation in the United States at federal and state levels along the dimensions of occupational health and safety, unjust dismissal, right-to-work, workplace safety and workers’ compensation, living wages, and prevailing...

This paper analyzes how non-competes, via wage bargaining, can affect firms’ incentives to provide their employees with on-the-job training. The results show that non-competes increase incentives to provide general training, but reduce those related to specific training.

The contract of employment heads the list of those labour market institutions whose continued usefulness is called into question by what appear to be fundamental changes in the world of work. However, given the multiple tasks of classification, regulation and redistribution which it has...