J.J. Prescott

Do Sex Offender Registration and Notification Laws Affect Criminal Behavior

Sex offenders have become targets of some of the most far-reaching and novel crime legislation in the United States. Two key innovations have been registration and notification laws, which, respectively, require that offenders provide identifying information to law enforcement and mandate that this information be made fully public. We study how registration and notification affect the frequency and incidence across victims of reported sex offenses. We present evidence that registration reduces the frequency of reported sex offenses against local victims (for example, neighbors) by keeping police informed about local sex offenders. Notification also appears to reduce crime, not by disrupting the criminal conduct of convicted sex offenders, but by deterring nonregistered offenders. We find that notification may actually increase recidivism. This latter finding, consistent with the idea that notification imposes severe costs that offset the benefits to offenders of forgoing criminal activity, is significant, given that notification’s purpose is recidivism reduction.

Noncompetes in the U.S. Labor Force

As typically unobserved features of the employment relationship, the role that covenants not to compete play in shaping economic dynamics is intrinsically difficult to grasp. Using nationally representative survey data on 11,505 labor force participants, we characterize the use of noncompetes by employer and employee characteristics and document the labor market effects with which they are associated. We find that noncompetes are more likely to be found in high skill, high paying occupations, but that they are also prevalent in low skill, low paying occupations. We document that negotiation over noncompetes is rare and that firms regularly delay the offering of the noncompete until after the employee has accepted the job. In the cross-section, noncompetes are associated with both increased retention and redirection from competitors, as well as a greater likelihood of receiving training and higher wages. We find little role for the enforceability of the noncompete both in determining where noncompetes are used and the strength of the relationship between a noncompete and labor market outcomes.

Noncompetes and Employee Mobility

We study the relationship between employment noncompetition agreements and employee mobility patterns using novel data from the 2014 Noncompete Survey Project. Specifically, we examine how noncompetes relate to the duration and nature of employee mobility, and we leverage our detailed individual-level survey data to identify and explore the precise mechanisms underlying the relationships we observe. We find that individuals with noncompetes appear to exhibit materially longer tenures and are more likely to depart for new employers that do not “compete” with their prior employers. To account for these patterns, we investigate the role noncompetes may play at each stage of the mobility “process”: job search, employer recruitment, offer receipt, negotiation, offer acceptance, etc. We present evidence that employees bound by noncompetes substitute job search activity and receptivity to recruitment in the direction of noncompetitors and that noncompetes are a factor in the choice to turn down approximately 40 percent of the offers employees receive from competitors.