Nondisclosure agreements and externalities from silence
How do contractual restrictions on worker voice affect information flows about employers? We develop a framework in which the legal risk from violating a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) reduces the willingness of workers to share negative information, making it more difficult for high-road employers to differentiate themselves to workers. Empirical support for these ideas comes from studying the relationship between NDA use and the content of Glassdoor reviews after three states prohibited employers from using NDAs to conceal unlawful conduct.
Clause and Effect: Theory and Field Experimental Evidence on Noncompete Clauses
We study worker noncompete clauses in a large field experiment with two finance firms. Across ~14,000 job offers to freelance recruiters on short-term contracts, we randomize wages and the presence, salience, and duration of noncompetes (all contracts also included a nondisclosure agreement). Removing a noncompete increases mobility between competing employers by 36–52% and raises workers’ total earnings from the two firms by 12–17%. We find no evidence—rejecting even small effects—that removing noncompetes generates secret leakage.
Understanding Firms’ AI Efforts and Their Economic Impact
Our research asks a central question for businesses investing heavily in artificial intelligence: Is AI actually making firms more productive, and if so, how? Using 15 years of data on AI-skilled employment at U.S. public firms, we find that firms increasing their AI investments experienced significantly faster productivity growth from 2018 to 2024—roughly one percentage point of additional productivity growth per year for a one-standard-deviation increase in AI investment. Importantly, these gains do not appear immediately; they build gradually over several years.
An Unattainable Emotional Advantage? Supervisors' Perceptual Biases in the Relationship Between Emotional Understanding Ability and Performance Ratings for Female Employees
Empathy is increasingly valued at workplaces as it facilitates interpersonal relationships, collaboration, and team functioning. Accordingly, organizations increasingly observe and recognize employees' emotional understanding (EU) ability—a key foundation of empathy—as an important dimension of individual merit in performance evaluations. We note that, however, supervisors' gender stereotypes may constrain whether EU ability is recognized properly, particularly for female employees.
Abortion Restriction Laws and Mobility of Scientists
We track the enactment of targeted regulation of abortion providers (TRAP) laws in the U.S. and analyze 4.98 million person-year mobility records for 535,568 biomedical scientists from 1990 to 2018. Our estimations reveal a 0.8-1.6 percentage-point increase in scientists’ relocation probability after states enacted abortion-restrictive laws, with substantially stronger effects among junior scientists (1.6-3.9 percentage points). Anti-abortion states also became less likely to be chosen as relocation destinations, particularly by higher-quality scientists.
If We Build It, We Will Come: Strategies for Developing Academic Institutions and the Evolution of Career Choices by Top Talent During Japan’s Industrialization
Modern day economies rely on academia—with its focus on generating new knowledge and training future work forces—as a critical complement to industry in contributing to endogenous growth. How well academia performs this role, however, depends on its ability to recruit and retain talented faculty who have lucrative alternative options in industry; moreover, such allocation of talent in academia vs. industry is conditioned by path-dependencies in the evolution of these sectors.
The Public Pension Crisis: Contractual Rights and Constitutional Limits
A timely response to the pressing issue of public pension reform, The Public Pension Crisis explores the complex relationship between contract law and government pensions, specifically focusing on the Contract Clause and related state Pension Clauses. Analyzing over a decade of litigation, the book highlights the evolving role of pension contracts in constitutional law and examines more than 70 landmark cases to establish a clear, principled framework for determining when pension benefits qualify as contractual obligations. T.
Setting Higher Referral Targets Increases the Number of Women Recommended: Evidence From the Field and Lab
Women continue to be underrepresented in numerous occupations and in the highest echelons of many organizations. This may be due, in part, to disadvantages they face in referral-based hiring and promotion processes. We propose a low-cost and easily scalable intervention to boost referrals of women in male-dominated contexts: requesting a greater target number of referrals (e.g., at least four instead of at least two referrals).
Evolution of Ride Services: From Ride- Hailing to Autonomous Vehicles
In recent years the ride service industry has been evolving rapidly, driven by disruptive technologies such as mobile apps, AI, and autonomous vehicles (AVs). While platform-based decentralized ride hailing companies have gained significant market share, vertically-integrated robotaxi services using emerging AVs are starting to enter the market. In this paper, we aim to provide insights about the evolution and the future of ride services studying these two competing business approaches.