Professors Norman Bishara and Jagadeesh Sivadasan have made significant contributions to influential literature examining the variation in the enforceability of non-compete clauses and their consequences. Their work is an important part of broader literature documenting monopsony power (i.e., the power of employees to set wages leading to a redistribution of surpluses away from workers), worker mobility, and knowledge transfers. In a pioneering paper published in 2010, Bishara created a detailed rating of the non-compete enforceability in all 50 states, building on painstaking work parsing the regulations and case law at the state level. The enforceability index from Bishara's 2010 paper, combined with worker-quarter-level U.S. Census data, was used in a paper by Sivadasan and co-authors to show that higher enforceability is correlated with lower wages and mobility for tech workers.

Bishara and his U-M coauthors also undertook a broad survey of U.S. workers, documenting for the first time the surprising prevalence of the use of non-compete clauses across a range of industries, including for low-wage workers, as well as work showing the chilling effect of noncompetes on employee behavior, even when they are unenforceable. This portfolio of work helped spark a major policy debate about the use and abuse of noncompetes that inspired action from the White House and the research conclusions being cited in the 2023 State of the Union Address, and spurred a report from U.S. Treasury Department, legislative changes from numerous states, and research from a range of think tanks that eventually led to the 2024 final rule from the Federal Trade Commission attempting to ban noncompetes in employment contracts across the country.