IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/35187.html

Anti-Harassment Policy and the Startup Labor Market

Author

Listed:
  • Jun Chen
  • Song Ma
  • Feng Zhang

Abstract

This paper examines how anti-harassment reforms that weaken non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) in sexual harassment cases affect the startup labor market. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design and LinkedIn data on over 50,000 U.S. VC-backed startups from 2014--2022, we find that NDA reforms reduce female hiring by about 8% annually without affecting male hiring, with effects concentrated among junior women and in small or male-dominated startups. Treated firms also experience more male manager departures, promote more women, and receive less VC funding. While NDA-weakening laws raise perceived legal risk and reduce female hiring, they trigger organizational restructuring that advances women into leadership.

Suggested Citation

  • Jun Chen & Song Ma & Feng Zhang, 2026. "Anti-Harassment Policy and the Startup Labor Market," NBER Working Papers 35187, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35187
    Note: CF LE LS PE POL PR
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w35187.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • G0 - Financial Economics - - General
    • J0 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - General
    • K0 - Law and Economics - - General
    • M14 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Business Administration - - - Corporate Culture; Diversity; Social Responsibility
    • M5 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Personnel Economics

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:nbr:nberwo:35187. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    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.