Professor Luisetto presented his paper, “Regulatory Failures Behind the Global Rise of Noncompetes,” at the 20th Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies (CELS), held at Northwestern Law in Chicago on October 2-3, 2026. He also served as an area organizer for the conference.

Using survey data from employers and employees across fifteen OECD countries, his paper finds that between 15% and 40% of workers are subject to noncompetes, many of which are unenforceable or unrelated to legitimate business interests, yet still shape workers job search behavior. The findings suggest that formal enforceability requirements alone are insufficient and that effective regulation requires complementary interventions to address the informational frictions that help explain the widespread misuse of noncompetes.

The full program of the conference may be found here: https://www.law.northwestern.edu/research-faculty/events/conferences/cels-2026/