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The purpose of this paper is to address ethical and legal issues relating to employment contracts and the effect on knowledge transfer.

Relevant literature for business competition, learning and knowledge management and ethics were reviewed to prepare this paper.

This paper was an opportunity to express an opinion that employment contracts should reflect economic realities of both the employer and the employed to encourage high‐ethical standards.

Employers and the employed may be encouraged to forthrightly discuss issues relating to ethics and competition in light of changing economic conditions.

This paper offers a self‐help perspective for employees, making them more aware of employment contract terms and responsibilities. Employers may be encouraged to craft more progressive contracts to not only protect business proprietary information and maintain ethical integrity, but also assist employees in taking control of their futures.

The purpose of this paper is to examine legal opportunities to develop creativity and innovation in a knowledge‐based economy.

This paper approaches legal issues from the perspective of the knowledge holder who is, more often than not, an individual in possession of some creative output that may potentially be of interest to a knowledge acquirer that is, more often than not, a business. The scope is limited to legal constraints and control mechanisms currently in use that restrict or discourage knowledge holders from achieving full creative potential, with the hope of encouraging further research on how to achieve the promise of a knowledge‐based economy. It is also limited, from a legal perspective, to US laws, with reference to a few international treaties.

While conducting research for this paper, it was found that, although there is a plethora of technological means that attempt to codify and harness innovation and encourage creativity, some legal mechanisms may be out‐moded and cumbersome. This is not to say that existing regimes, like intellectual property law, are useless, but that they are designed to take advantage of brick and mortar inventions that have little in common with the products and services being considered for the future.

It is anticipated that there will be a sea‐change in traditional thought about laws relating to knowledge and rights management. Historically, knowledge holders have been at a disadvantage when negotiating with knowledge acquirers. Now that the commodity is knowledge, knowledge holders have a unique opportunity to reveal, or not, to their own advantage. The goal of this paper is to identify alternative scenarios to encourage the flow of information to the benefit of knowledge holders as well as knowledge acquirers.

This chapter provides a briefly summary of the main message and contribution of Martin C. Goossen's and Gianluca Carnabuci's paper “When Employees Walk Out the Door, Their Memories Remain: The Effect of Inventor Mobility on Patent Renewal”. It situates the paper and its contribution in the broader literature and provides critical areas and possible avenues for future research.

This paper summarizes a study, undertaken by Arthur Andersen’s Intellectual Property Group in London, to consider the economic and financial issues, principally as they affect the valuation of intellectual property and its suitability as security. The study encompasses a review of available literature, interviews and discussions, and an analysis of the results of a questionnaire which was distributed to owners and managers of intellectual property. Views were canvassed across industries, of both borrowers and lenders, and also of lawyers and other advisers experienced in the transactions involving intellectual property.

The purpose of this paper is to expand the empirical literature on the association between non-compete agreement (NCA) enforceability and entrepreneurship by investigating how NCA policies affect different types of entrepreneurship with incorporated and unincorporated businesses.

The authors estimate difference-in-differences regressions based on individual-level data. This allows to control for heterogeneity at the individual level. Additionally, the authors provide graphical evidence using the synthetic control method (SCM).

The authors' findings show that the decrease in the enforceability of NCAs in Massachusetts resulted in a higher rate of unincorporated entrepreneurship among low-wage workers. At the same time, there was no sizable effect on the rate of incorporated entrepreneurship. For Utah, the authors' results indicate that the reform increased both types of entrepreneurship. The findings imply that states can promote entrepreneurial activity by reducing the enforceability of NCAs. The way of changing the enforceability of NCAs matters, as different provisions encourage different types of entrepreneurship in a given state.

The authors contribute to the literature on NCA enforceability effects on entrepreneurship in three ways. First, the authors utilize two quasi-experiments, the NCA policy changes in Utah in 2016 and Massachusetts in 2018, limiting NCAs to one year for all workers. Second, to the authors' knowledge, this is the first individual-level analysis that separates self-employment with incorporated and unincorporated businesses as two different types of entrepreneurship to analyze potentially heterogeneous effects of NCAs. Third, this is the first study to utilize American Community Survey (ACS) data in this literature.

This is a survey of pertinent topics involving employment law issues in the securities industry. The topics include employment agreement (restrictive covenants, enforcement, etc.) issues with registered representatives, and reductions in force (RIFs).

This article addresses, in the third‐party acquisition context, how a series of U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and District Court decisions have chilled the use of tender offers as an expedient, and often the optimum, method of business combination or sale of control. These decisions have disparately construed the applicability of the SEC’s “all holders‐best price” rule (contained in the federal tender offer regulations) to an increasing variety of compensatory and other management payment arrangements which, while often incidental and certainly related to the tender offer, may not necessarily have been intended as deal consideration paid to the recipients. Until there is resolution by the U.S. Supreme Court or definitive guidance from the SEC on the ambit of Rule 14d‐10, expedient and less costly tender offer structures are yielding to single‐step mergers. This is not always the best result for stockholders.