Dear Applied Statistics Workshop,
Please join us at the applied statistics workshop this Wednesday when Lee
Fleming, Harvard Business School, will present "Mobility, Skills, and the
Michigan Noncompete Experiment". Lee provided the following abstract:
While prior research has considered the desirability and implications of
employee mobility, less research has considered factors affecting the ease
of mobility. This paper explores a legal constraint on mobility —employee
noncompete agreements—by exploiting Michigan's apparently-inadvertent 1985
reversal of its enforcement policy as a natural experiment. Using a
differences-in-differences approach, and controlling for changes in the auto
industry central to Michigan's economy, we find that the enforcement of
noncompetes indeed attenuates mobility. Moreover, noncompete enforcement
decreases mobility most sharply for inventors with firm-specific skills, and
for those who specialize in narrow technical fields. The results speak to
the literature on mobility constraints while offering a credibly exogenous
source of variation that can extend previous research.
The paper for the talk is available
here<http://people.fas.harvard.edu/%7Ejgrimmer/michigan_experiment2.0.pd…
The applied statistics workshop meets at 12 noon in room N-354, CGIS-Knafel
(1737 Cambridge St) with a light lunch. Presentations usually begin around
1215 and usually run until about 130 pm.
Please contact me with any questions
Cheers,
Justin Grimmer