Lee Fleming on "Mobility, Skills, and the Michigan Noncompete Experiment" 

 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  

 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.