Do contracts influence behavior independent of the law governing their enforceability? We explore this question in the context of employment noncompetes, using nationally representative data for 11,500 labor force participants. We show that noncompetes are associated with reductions in employee...

Family firms are known for their reluctance to invest in research and development. We show that strengthened trade secret protection is associated with higher R&D investment by family firms. More specifically, we show that the association between the strength of trade secret protection through...

Extant work in strategic management has focused on the role of various legal levers when managing human capital. Companies use such levers to improve employee retention and prevent leakage of knowledge to rivals. Specifically, noncompete agreements (NCAs), contracts that prevent employees from...

Trade secrecy law is a hybrid between intellectual property and unfair competition law. This makes the characterisation of trade secrecy law for the purpises of private international law difficult. This paper argues that neither the EU conflict of law rules for unfair competition law nor those...

We examine the effects of trade secret protection laws on firms’ internal transparency. By internal transparency, we refer to the extent to which information is integrated, distributed, and shared within the firm. We argue that stronger trade secret protection reduces firms’ proprietary...