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I contribute to the literature on institutions, gender, and entrepreneurship by showing that macrolevel institutional policies that do not explicitly target women nonetheless discourage them from leveraging prior professional experience—their own and that of others—in founding new ventures. Most ventures fail, but chances of success are greater if founders can bring to bear their professional expertise. However, employee non-compete agreements enjoin workers from leaving their employer to found a rival business in the same industry. Thus, non-competes add legal risk to business risk. To the extent that women exhibit greater risk aversion, the threat of litigation from their ex-employer may act as a sharper brake on startup activity than for men. Examining all workers who were employed exclusively within 25 states and the District of Columbia from 1990 to 2014, I find that women subject to tighter non-compete policies were less likely to leave their employers and start rival businesses. Non-competes increase the risk of entrepreneurship by making it harder to hire talent with relevant experience, shifting women away from higher potential ventures. A review of thousands of filed lawsuits suggests that firms do not target women in non-compete cases. Rather, it appears that non-competes disproportionately discourage women from leveraging their professional networks in hiring the sort of talent necessary for high-growth startups to succeed.

What role do social connections play in the labor market? A vast, influential literature has detailed the ways in which ties facilitate the flow of information about job opportunities to workers as well as endorsements or referrals of workers to firms. We propose that this role is not constrained to an informational one alone. Rather, relationships between workers can enable a collective job-matching process that facilitates the transfer of shared human capital from one organization to another. Yet "comobility" has been studied only occasionally and among elite workers in particular industries. This study delivers both fieldwork as well as large-sample analysis among all nongovernmental workers in Denmark, finding a 5.5% wage premium for those who move jointly instead of independently, both in the full sample as well as when applying strict matching or fixed effects for workers or firms. Co-movers whose skills are related but not identical capture a higher premium, and the wage gains associated with comobility are not limited to highly skilled workers but rather obtain across a wide range of occupations. Robustness tests establish that the wage premium associated with comobility is not driven by efforts to capture "prized" workers, by employee referrals, or by aggressive hiring by firms. This study provides the first quantification of the anticipated value of comobility, suggesting that both workers and firms may want to revisit individualistic assumptions about how labor markets function. More broadly, our findings show that social relationships can transfer not only information but jointly held human capital across organizational boundaries.

Afrequent claim in the entrepreneurship literature is that employees learn to become entrepreneurs during paid employment. We revisit this mechanism in the context of the well-established finding that smaller firms generate higher rates of entrepreneurship. We propose a novel mechanism responsible for higher rates of entrepreneurship emanating from smaller firms: large firms might have a advantage over small firms in providing internal opportunities to retain entrepreneurial talent. We test this claim in a setting where firm dissolution extinguishes internal opportunities, using a new hand-collected data set of career histories in the automatic speech recognition (ASR) industry. For nondefunct firms, we replicate the "small-firm effect." However, the small-firm effect no longer holds within the subsample of defunct firms: entrepreneurship rates among individuals present at firm dissolution are in fact higher for larger firms. Additional analyses indicate that this effect is unlikely to be driven by the early departure of higher-skilled workers who anticipate the firm's demise. Finally, we find preliminary evidence consistent with the notion that large organizations may not only retain but also "mold" workers into entrepreneurs. More broadly, the study emphasizes the need to consider a novel mechanism responsible for transition into entrepreneurship—the role of opportunities available to employees in incumbent firms.