Employee non-compete agreements are an integral part of the professional experience for many knowledge workers and may have pronounced effects on innovation, entrepreneurship, and the occupational trajectories of individuals. Yet scholars have rarely considered non-competes in their analysis of related phenomena. For instance, although hundreds of articles have been written on turnover, few if any of these have considered the potential implications of non-competes for interorganizational mobility. Similarly, studies of occupational change have neglected to account for how such contracts might affect individuals' ability to determine their career paths. More broadly, despite a broad intellectual property literature regarding patents, very few have considered the complementary mechanism of trade-secret protection, which non competes are ostensibly designed to protect.;In this dissertation, I begin to fill this gap with a multi-method study of the implications of employee non-compete agreements. I collect original field data via randomly-sampled interviews and a survey conducted in conjunction with the IEEE engineering society, which help to ground intuitions regarding how non-compete agreements shape occupational decision-making. The resulting propositions are then tested using patent data, which facilitates tracking the work histories of individuals over several decades. Key to this analysis is the discovery of an apparently-inadvertent non-compete policy reversal in Michigan during the mid-1980s, which I use as a natural experiment in the specification of a differences-in-differences model.;The results show that non-competes affect both the decision to leave one's employer as well as post-employment choices. Individuals subject to non-competes are less likely to change jobs, particularly when their skills are less transferable to other firms or industries. When workers nonetheless change jobs, they change fields---or refrain from working entirely---in order to avoid violating the terms of the non-compete. Those who do not honor the non-compete often seek protection from potential lawsuits by joining a large firm. That non-competes prevent individuals from exercising their expertise, or that they discourage them from joining small companies, illustrates the potential impact of non-competes on broader outcomes including innovative activity and participation in entrepreneurial ventures. These findings contribute to the literature regarding intellectual property, interorganizational mobility, and occupational change.
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