New Evidence on Employee Noncompete, No Poach, and No Hire Agreements in the Franchise Sector

Peter Norlander

A chapter in Big Data Applications in Labor Economics, Part B, 2024, vol. 52B, pp 225-253 from Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Abstract: This article presents new evidence on anticompetitive practices in the franchise sector. Drawing from a corpus of Franchise Disclosure Documents (FDDs) filed by 3,716 franchise brands in years 2011–2023 (partial), I report new information on franchise brands' use of interfirm nonsolicitation (“no poach”) clauses barring recruitment between firms, no hire clauses barring employment, and franchisor requirements that franchisees use employee noncompete clauses barring workers from joining competitors. Regulatory actions that restricted the enforceability of anticompetitive clauses began to appear in FDDs in 2018. While nonsolicitation and no hire clauses have declined in use, the use of noncompetes remained stable over time. While prior evidence on anticompetitive practices largely draws from individual complaints, survey data, and limited hand-coded samples, this article spotlights new methods for finding barriers to worker mobility in large, unstructured text corpora.

Keywords: Barriers to job mobility; franchise sector; noncompete; nonsolicitation; computational text analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (text/html)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... 7-91212024000052B031
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:rleczz:s0147-91212024000052b031

DOI: 10.1108/S0147-91212024000052B031

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Research in Labor Economics from Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emerald Support ().