Kate Reinmuth
Photo by Scott MacDonald
I’m a 6th-year PhD candidate in the Department of Economics at Stanford University, specializing in labor economics and industrial organization.
I also completed my JD at Stanford Law School in 2025, which informs my research through engagement with antitrust, intellectual property, contract, and labor law.
I will be on the academic job market this year (2026-27).
You can reach me at reinmuth@stanford.edu.
PhD Committee:
Working Papers
The Leaky Pipeline: Retention, Performance, and Promotion Policies [Econ JMP]
(with Brian Higgins)
Despite substantial progress toward labor market parity, women remain less likely than men to be promoted in many professions. This paper studies how firm promotion policies shape these gaps in large law firms, where women make up the majority of junior associates but only 33% of new equity partners. Using new administrative panel data from a large U.S. law firm, we find that differences in associate retention to the promotion stage account for 31% of the gap, while differences in performance among retained associates, measured using total billable hours, account for the remaining 69%. Although individual promotions are not observed, we infer the status quo promotion policy from aggregate promotion rates and find that a gender-neutral promotion policy can rationalize the data. We then estimate a dynamic labor supply model to evaluate how alternative promotion policies would affect worker behavior, promotion gaps, and firm productivity. Several alternative promotion policies could reduce the promotion gap, but through different margins and with different effects on firm productivity. Among the policies considered, accounting for part-time schedules when measuring performance is especially promising: the model suggests that doing so could cut the promotion gap in half while generating weakly positive productivity effects.
Consumer Welfare and Misallocation in Panic Buying of Gasoline
(with Katja Hofmann)
Panic buying describes a sudden, unanticipated surge in demand, triggered by a real or perceived disruption. In anticipation, consumers front-load purchases, thereby congesting the market and raising the risk of shortages. When prices are slow to adjust, non-price rationing emerges, with ambiguous effects on allocative efficiency across heterogeneous consumers. We study the welfare and allocative effects of panic buying in the context of a two-week episode of panic buying of gasoline in the UK. We combine novel data on station wait times and card transactions to study two sources of welfare loss: elevated shopping costs and misallocation. We develop a model in which heterogeneous consumers trade off the benefit from refueling, given their belief about future fuel availability, against endogenously determined shopping costs. Compared to the optimal allocation, we find substantial losses in status-quo consumer surplus driven by misallocation as front-loading consumers crowded out those with emptier gas tanks. We evaluate alternative allocation rules and their potential in mitigating these losses.
Disclosures, Deals, and Dollars: A Survey of Management Practices in University Technology Transfer Offices
(with Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Daniela Scur, and Heidi Williams)
University technology transfer offices (TTOs) have helped translate academic research into transformative technologies ranging from biotechnology to modern computing. Despite their importance, there is little systematic evidence on how TTO management practices shape commercialization outcomes. We conducted structured interviews with leaders of U.S. TTOs, coded management practices across disclosure intake, patenting, and licensing, and linked these measures to survey data on technology transfer outcomes. TTOs report heterogeneous, often competing objectives, complicating performance measurement and comparisons. Management practices also vary widely despite shared legal and funding environments. Moreover, process standardization—often promoted as best practice—has task-dependent effects: standardized licensee search correlates with more licenses, while more rule-based patenting decisions are associated with fewer filings (potentially filtering low-value applications). By contrast, standardization of license negotiation shows no clear relationship with licensing outcomes. These findings suggest that improving the research-to-market pipeline requires goal- and task-specific approaches rather than uniform policies, and that substantial opportunities exist for cross-institutional learning. Our results provide a benchmark for universities and a measurement framework for future technology transfer policy evaluation.
Publications
Innovation through Inventor Mobility: Evidence from Non-Compete Agreements
(with Emma Rockall)
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics (Forthcoming)
Proponents of labor mobility restrictions argue that innovation incentives more than offset harm to workers. Yet the causal effect of such policies on innovation is an open empirical question. Leveraging plausibly exogenous state-level changes in the enforceability of non-compete agreements, we find a significant negative effect on innovation. This effect is even larger for the most novel and innovative patents and firms. Further analysis shows that these negative effects on innovation cannot be explained by entry alone and instead likely result from reduced knowledge flows. Our findings suggest that labor mobility plays a crucial role in spreading knowledge across firms.
Policy Impact: cited in FTC Final Rule Banning NCAs, Senate Testimony, and Ohio Senate Testimony
News Coverage: ProMarket
Striking the Balance: University Commercialization and Scientific Research Productivity
Stanford Journal of Law, Economics & Business (2025)
University-based discoveries that drive economic growth are a natural byproduct of scientific research. However, many of these inventions never realize their full potential value because they “languish” in universities and never diffuse to the broader economy. University technology license agreements are critical tools for idea diffusion. However, some fear that giving scientists more commercial responsibilities will crowd out core scientific tasks like basic research. To assess these competing viewpoints, this Note investigates the impact of university technology licensing on scientists’ academic research performance at Stanford University, finding that licensing significantly increases the number of papers that a scientist publishes and providing a promising indication of the complementarity of academic research and technology transfer.
News Coverage: Stanford Report
Default Difficulties: Merchants' Reliance on Default Rules that Harm Consumers
Stanford Law Review (2025)
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.
Turnover, Loyalty and Competence in the West Wing: The Trump White House in Historical Context
(with Matt Dickinson)
Presidential Studies Quarterly (2021)
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.