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Working Paper
A Spanner in the Works: Restricting Labor Mobility and the Inevitable Capital-Labor Substitution
We model an environment with overlapping generations of labor to show that policies restricting labor mobility increase a firm's monopsony power and labor turnover costs. Subsequently, firms increase capital expenditure, altering their optimal capital-labor ratio. We confirm this by exploiting the statewide adoption of the inevitable disclosure doctrine (IDD), a law intended to protect trade secrets by restricting labor mobility. Following an IDD adoption, local firms increase capital expenditure (capital-labor ratio) by 3.5 percent (5.5 percent). This result is magnified for firms with ...
Working Paper
Does Knowledge Protection Benefit Shareholders? Evidence from Stock Market Reaction and Firm Investment in Knowledge Assets
This paper studies whether knowledge protection affects shareholder value and firms' investment in knowledge assets using the staggered adoptions and rejections of the inevitable disclosure doctrine (IDD) by U.S. state courts as exogenous changes in the level of knowledge protection. We find positive (negative) abnormal stock returns around the IDD adoption (rejection) day for firms headquartered in the state and uncover a positive IDD treatment effect on firms' investment in knowledge assets. Moreover, the effects on stock returns and knowledge assets investment are stronger in more ...