IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jleorg/v31y2015i1p30-60..html

Client-Based Entrepreneurship

Author

Listed:
  • James E. Rauch
  • Joel Watson

Abstract

Client relationships create value, which employees may try to wrest from their employers by establishing their own firms. If an employer and worker cannot contract on the output and profits of the worker’s prospective new firm, at the beginning of their relationship the employer induces the worker to sign a contract that prohibits him from competing or soliciting the current client in the event of termination of employment. The socially optimal level of entrepreneurship will nevertheless be achieved if clients, employers, and workers can renegotiate these restrictive employment contracts and make compensating transfers. If workers cannot finance transfers to employers, however, employers and workers will sign contracts that are too restrictive and produce too little entrepreneurship, and governments can increase welfare by limiting enforcement of these contracts. With or without liquidity constraints, locations where noncompete contracts are less enforced will attract more clients and have higher employment and output. (JEL K12, L26, R10)

Suggested Citation

  • James E. Rauch & Joel Watson, 2015. "Client-Based Entrepreneurship," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 31(1), pages 30-60.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:jleorg:v:31:y:2015:i:1:p:30-60.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jleo/ewt023
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Evan Starr & Natarajan Balasubramanian & Natarajan Balasubramanian, 2018. "Screening Spinouts? How Noncompete Enforceability Affects the Creation, Growth, and Survival of New Firms," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 64(2), pages 552-572, February.
    2. Muendler, Marc-Andreas & Rauch, James E. & Tocoian, Oana, 2012. "Employee spinoffs and other entrants: Stylized facts from Brazil," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 30(5), pages 447-458.
    3. Rauch, James E., 2016. "Dynastic entrepreneurship, entry, and non-compete enforcement," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 86(C), pages 188-201.
    4. Evan Starr & Justin Frake & Rajshree Agarwal, 2019. "Mobility Constraint Externalities," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 30(5), pages 961-980, September.
    5. Wickelgren, Abraham L., 2018. "A novel justification for legal restrictions on non-compete clauses," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(C), pages 49-57.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • K12 - Law and Economics - - Basic Areas of Law - - - Contract Law
    • L26 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Entrepreneurship
    • R10 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:jleorg:v:31:y:2015:i:1:p:30-60.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/jleo .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.