Norman Bishara and Jagadeesh Sivadasan
How Non-Competes Harm Workers

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). 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. Bishara and his U-M co-authors also undertook a broad survey of 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. 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.