Geoff Manne on Noncompete Agreements

ICLE President Geoffrey A. Manne was cited in the Substack newsletter The War on Prices in a post about the Federal Trade Commission’s ban on noncompete agreements. You can read the full piece here.

Other law and economics scholars, such as Geoffrey Manne, oppose the ban. Non-competes are voluntary agreements between employers and employees, and so should generally be mutually beneficial. And there are clearly many scenarios under which non-competes can provide firms with the confidence to train new workers, share competition-sensitive information with staff, and take a chance on hiring “risky” personnel with a tendency to jump ship. At the very least, if we are to “experiment” with banning such clauses, says Manne, it should be at the state level, rather than a federal mandate. There are evidently a lot of complex trade-offs, some of which might only become clear after this Chesterton Fence has been torn down.