Essays on employee non-compete agreements

Employee non-compete agreements are an integral part of the professional experience for many knowledge workers and may have pronounced effects on innovation, entrepreneurship, and the occupational trajectories of individuals. Yet scholars have rarely considered non-competes in their analysis of related phenomena. For instance, although hundreds of articles have been written on turnover, few if any of these have considered the potential implications of non-competes for interorganizational mobility. Similarly, studies of occupational change have neglected to account for how such contracts might affect individuals' ability to determine their career paths. More broadly, despite a broad intellectual property literature regarding patents, very few have considered the complementary mechanism of trade-secret protection, which non-competes are ostensibly designed to protect.