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Research

  • How Do Firms Respond to Gender Quotas? Evidence From California's SB826

  • Abstract

    This study examines the impact of California’s SB826, enacted in 2018 and requiring at least one female director on corporate boards by 2019, on financial performance and governance. The quota reduced the share of all-male boards by 24 percentage points without harming financial performance from 2018 to 2021. Governance measures remained stable. Firms responded with both tokenism and meaningful integration, with tokenism more common in larger boards and those in male-dominated industries. I find that SB826 reduced firms’ reliance on existing networks, suggesting that network barriers may have previously prevented some qualified women from joining boards.

  • Presentations

    • Interdisciplinary Seminar Series at Columbia University (2022)
    • Discrimination and Diversity Workshop at University of East Anglia (2022)
    • 17th Annual Economics Graduate Student Conference at Washington University in St. Louis (2022)
    • Society of Labor Economists (2024)
    • Canadian Economics Association (2024)

  • Link to full study

  • Do Non-Compete Agreements Help or Harm Workers? (with Xiangru Li and Luke Rawling)

  • Abstract

    Non-compete agreements are provisions within employment contracts that prevent workers from joining competing firms. They are widespread in the US workforce, with 15\% of workers having such clauses in their contracts at a given point in time. Despite their prevalence, there is limited research on the incentives for workers and firms to use non-compete agreements, and the causal effects of these agreements on worker outcomes. We show theoretically that non-compete agreements shift the nature of allocative inefficiency -- reducing inefficient quits but increasing inefficient retention -- while mitigating the canonical hold-up problem. The model predicts that (i) non-compete agreements are more likely to be used in industries with higher rates of job mobility and (ii) non-compete signers have longer job tenures, higher wages, and receive more firm-provided investment than similar workers without such agreements. Using panel data from the NLSY97 and a difference in difference research design, we estimate the causal impact of signing a non-compete agreement on various labor market outcomes. We find that non-compete agreements raise job tenures by 6\% and wages by 9\% within one year, with these effects persisting at least six years. Consistent with the theory, we observe that non-compete signers are concentrated in industries with higher rates of job mobility, though we do not find evidence indicating that signing a non-compete agreement raises observed measures of employer-provided training.

  • Presentations

    • Queen's University Faculty-PhD Working Group (2024)
    • Organizations and Markets Workshop at Smith School of Business (2024)
    • European Association of Labor Economists (2024)
    • Southern Economics Association (2024)

  • Link to Full Study

Other Works in Progress

  • The Effects of Non-Compete Regulation
  • Mandatory Disclosure and Female Representation in Corporate Leadership (with Dhruv Baswal)