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.

true Throughout most of the twentieth century, economic growth was associated with rising median real wages. However, since the early 1980s, measured median real hourly compensation has been stagnant despite robust productivity growth. To the extent that measured real wage growth has occurred, it has been concentrated disproportionately at the upper end of the wage distribution. Many view the lack of growth of median wages over this time period as evidence that the American middle class has not advanced and as a symptom of declining social mobility. The decoupling of measured median real wage growth and productivity growth has been viewed as a puzzle among both academics and policy makers. During this time period, there has also been a separation of wage growth and othermacroeconomic fundamentals. For instance, theUnited States has had record low levels of unemployment in the years prior to the global pandemic, yet during the prepandemic period there was little accompanying wage growth. This presents an apparent contradiction of the long-standing Phillips curve analysis that negatively relates unemployment towage growth. Researchers have begun to dig into this puzzle of late (see, e.g., Del Negro et al. 2020). Recent explanations involve the possibility that we have mismeasured the amount of slack in the economy (Krueger, Cramer, and Cho 2014; Abraham, Haltiwanger, and Rendell 2020) or that we have a flatter

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.

We study how active labor market policies affect the exchange of information and support among job seekers. Leveraging a unique social network survey in Ethiopia, we find that a randomized job search assistance intervention reduces information sharing and support between treated job seekers and their active job search partners. Because of lower job search support, untreated individuals search less and, suggestively, have worse employment outcomes. These results are consistent with a model of networks where unemployed individuals form job search partnerships to exploit the complementarities of job search.

We propose a model of intergenerational transmission of education wherein children belong to either highly educated or low-educated families. Children choose the intensity of their social activities, while parents decide how much educational effort to exert. Using Add Health data, we find that, on average, children’s homophily acts as a complement to the educational effort of highly educated parents but as a substitute for the educational effort of low-educated parents. We also find that policies that subsidize kids’ socialization efforts can backfire for low-educated students because they tend to increase their interactions with other low-educated students.