KATE REINMUTH

RESEARCH

Selected Work in Progress

Innovation through Labor Mobility: Evidence from Non-Compete Agreements (Working Paper) - Kate Reinmuth and Emma Rockall

Much of the United States workforce is subject to non-compete agreements. Proponents argue that non-competes provide innovation incentives that outweigh negative worker outcomes like suppressed wages. In reality, the causal effect of non-competes on innovation is an open empirical question. To answer it, we leverage plausibly exogenous state-level changes in enforceability, finding that non-competes have a significant negative effect on innovation—a 13% drop in patenting for an average-sized increase in enforceability. Further analysis shows that this effect manifests primarily for incumbents rather than entrants. Moreover, our work suggests a central role for labor mobility as a channel of idea diffusion that increases overall innovation, with inventor mobility expected to fall alongside patenting by 22% for an increase in enforceability of the mean size in our sample.​

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Survey of TTO Management Practices (Work in Progress) - Lisa Ouellette, Kate Reinmuth, Daniela Scur, Caleb Watney, and Heidi Williams

Building on the World Management Survey – a large, international data-collection process that has enabled researchers to study the quality of organizational management practices – we are fielding a large-scale survey of management practices in US university-based technology transfer offices.

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Peer-Reviewed Publications

Turnover, Loyalty and Competence in the West Wing: The Trump White House in Historical Context (Presidential Studies Quarterly, 2021) - Matthew Dickinson and Kate Reinmuth

Pundits and scholars alike point to the high rates of administrative chaos and staff turnover in the Trump White House, but prior research has not been able to pin down the cause(s) empirically. In this paper, we develop a survival model and conduct a Bayesian latent trait analysis to examine the tenure rates of White House aides serving presidents Nixon through Trump. We find that, compared to his presidential predecessors, Trump′s White House stands out for its lack of personally loyal aides. This is not surprising given that his pre-presidential career would not have allowed him to develop the cadre of political loyalists that typically accompanied his predecessors into the West Wing. Nonetheless, we show that it was this lack of personal loyalty among his staff, and not any shortcoming in competence, that led to high rates of turnover.

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Law Review Publications

Default Difficulties: The Case for Regulatory Intervention in Merchants' Reliance on Default Rules that Harm Consumers (Stanford Law Review, forthcoming 2025) - Kate Reinmuth

This Note investigates how incomplete contracting between merchant parties may harm third-party consumers. After defining this phenomenon and noting several examples, this Note considers solutions to the social inefficiencies arising from these merchant-to-merchant contracts. To do so, this Note engages in a detailed case study of generic drug shortages and how incomplete failure-to-supply provisions affect patients’ ability to access essential drugs. Such shortages typify the incomplete contracts at issue in this Note. Ultimately, this Note proposes a regulatory solution to firms’ reliance on default rules that would reduce the incidence of extreme negative externalities on third parties.

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Other Publications

Change and Continuity in White House Staffing: The Trump Factor (De Gruyter, 2021) - Matthew Dickinson and Kate Reinmuth

Early assessments of Trump’s White House portrayed an organization riven by personality disputes and administrative chaos. But in many ways, Trump’s White House staff descriptively bears a strong resemblance to its predecessors, as we demonstrate by drawing on more than 50 years of data on presidential staff composition. In terms of size, structure, and the distributions of functions, the Trump White House represents not a break with the past so much as its continuation. Trump’s staffing patterns departed from precedent more in the areas of staff turnover and recruitment; however, it is not clear just how significant those changes are.

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Does Bill James’s Pythagorean Formula Apply to England’s Premier League? (Journal of Student Research, 2018) - Kate Reinmuth and Paul Sommers

Bill James’s Pythagorean formula relates runs scored and runs allowed to team winning in Major League Baseball. Others have applied James’s Pythagorean formula to basketball, ice hockey, and tennis, among other sports. Current literature, however, questions  the  applicability  of  the  Pythagorean  approach  to  soccer. This  paper  finds  that  such  results  may  be  because  the dependent variable is based on the Fédération Internationale de Football Association’s (FIFA) point system rather than wins and losses. The authors successfully apply James’s Pythagorean formula to soccer and, in particular, England’s Premier League (EPL). Between 2000/01 and 2016/17, there is a statistically significant relationship between a team’s goal ratio (defined as goals scored divided by goals allowed) and a team’s win-loss ratio. A one percent increase in the goal ratio is associated with a 1.70 percent increase in the win-loss ratio.

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Trump, Congress, and Health Care: All Politics Is National (De Gruyter, 2017) - Matt Dickinson and Kate Reinmuth

John McCain’s dramatic early-morning “no” vote may have been the immediate cause of the Republican failure to repeal and replace Obamacare. However, Republicans undertook this endeavor from a weak political vantage point. The 2016 elections gave Republicans very little margin for error in Congress – a margin threatened by Trump’s inexperience and lack of political capital. Longer-term trends, including the polarization of the two congressional parties against the backdrop of increasingly nationalized elections, exacerbated this situation by leaving Trump and Republicans little choice but to legislate through their own party caucus – or to not legislate at all.

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Policy Reports

Report on Annual Payments In Lieu of Taxes to Towns For Land Owned By the Agency of Natural Resources (2014) - produced by Division of Property Valuation and Review (Jim Knapp, Doug Lay, Brad Jackson), The Agency of Natural Resources (Mike Fraysier, Ryan Horvath), and Legislative Joint Fiscal Office (Stephanie Barrett, Kate Reinmuth) in consultation with Vermont League of Cities and Towns (Steve Jeffrey)