Knowledge that Transforms

I study regulation of noncompete employment contracts, assessing the trade‐off between restricting worker mobility and encouraging firm investment. I develop an on‐the‐job search model in which firms and workers sign dynamic wage contracts with noncompete clauses and firms invest in their workers' general human capital. Employers use noncompete clauses to enforce buyout payments when their workers depart, ultimately extracting rent from future employers. This rent extraction is socially excessive, and restrictions on these clauses can improve efficiency. The optimal regulation policy is characterized. In an application to the managerial labor market using a novel contract data set, I find the optimal policy to be quantitatively close to a ban.

Increasing mother’s labor supply during a child’s preschool years may reduce time investments, yielding a negative direct effect on midchildhood and teenage outcomes. But as mother’s work hours increase, income will rise. Can income compensate for the negative effect of hours? Our mediation analysis exploits exogenous variation in both mother’s hours and family income. Results suggest a negative, insignificant direct effect from increasing mother’s hours on child test scores. However, the positive mediating effect of income creates a positive total effect on test scores (26% of a standard deviation) for a 10-hour increase in mother’s weekly hours in preschool years.

This paper studies learning among coworkers when incentives change. We use a simple principal-agent model to show that when workers are not fully informed on the global shape of the production function, (1) their effort choice changes over time as information is disclosed and processed and (2) changing incentives can trigger this learning process. We test this prediction using personnel data from an egg production plant in Peru. Exploiting a sudden change in the contract parameters, we find that workers learn from each other over the shape of the production function. This adjustment process is costly for the firm.

Social and emotional learning (SEL) programs that target disruptive students aim to improve their classroom behavior. Small-scale programs in high-income countries have demonstrated positive effects. Using a randomized experiment, we show that a nationwide SEL program in Chile has no effect. Very disruptive students seem to reduce the program’s effectiveness. With attention deficit hyperactivity disorder being more prevalent in middle- than high-income countries, very disruptive students may be more present there, which could diminish the effectiveness of SEL programs. Moreover, implementation fidelity seems lower in this program than in the small-scale ones considered earlier, which could also explain the program’s null effect.

We investigate how sizes of professional networks affect the probability of appointment to a supervisory board and whether the effect is gendered. Using an employer-employee data set of the Danish labor market, 1995–2011, we find larger networks to associate with a higher probability of becoming a first-time director. The effect is larger for men. One explanation is that men, compared with women, have more connections to larger and listed firms and to other males—attributes that increase the appointment probability. Women who have connections to incumbent directors before being appointed director have more labor market experience than other directors.

We investigate the impact on work absences of a large reduction in paid sick leave benefits in Spain. Our results highlight substantial decreases in frequency (number of spells) mostly offset by increases in duration (length of spells). Overall, the policy did reduce the number of days lost to sick leave. For some, however, return to work was premature, as we document large increases in both the proportion of relapses and the number of working accidents. Displacement toward this unaffected benefit scheme cancels out almost two-fifths of the gains in terms of estimated absence reductions from the sick leave benefit cut.