Kate Reinmuth

Selected Work in Progress

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Innovation through Inventor Mobility: Evidence from Non-Compete Agreements (R&R at AEJ Applied; Current Draft: July 2025)

with Emma Rockall

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

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Consumer Welfare and Misallocation in Panic Buying of Gasoline (Draft Coming Soon; Under Review by Data Provider)

with Katja Hofmann

Episodes of panic buying feature sudden spikes in demand, driven by consumers who front-load purchases. When prices adjust slowly, the market turns to non-price rationing, with ambiguous effects on allocative efficiency. We study the welfare and allocative effects of panic buying in the context of the 2021 UK fuel crisis, in which a nationwide news shock about potential delivery disruptions caused long queues and widespread shortages at gas stations. We combine unique data on gas station wait times with transaction data from a large payment card network to reconstruct the dynamic nature of the crisis and to link consumers' refill behavior to rich proxies of spending and mobility before the panic. Descriptive evidence points to misallocation: consumers who would have refilled in normal times are crowded out by consumers who front-load their purchases. To quantify the welfare effect, we develop a model in which consumers trade off the benefit from refilling, given their belief about future fuel availability, against endogenously determined shopping costs. To estimate the model, we leverage plausibly exogenous variation in consumers' initial tank levels and cross-market variation in shopping costs stemming from differences in station buffer stocks. We benchmark the equilibrium outcome against the social planner allocation and find substantial losses to consumer surplus, driven by misallocation. We evaluate counterfactual allocation mechanisms and their potential in mitigating these losses.

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Disclosures, Deals, and Dollars: A Survey of Management Practices in University Technology Transfer Offices (Draft Coming Soon)

with Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, Daniela Scur, and Heidi Williams

We collect new data on management practices for a broad sample of university-based technology transfer offices (TTOs) in the United States. We survey these offices on a variety of topics, including their objectives and vision for the office; their processes around invention disclosure, patent filing, and licensing; performance metrics; budget setting; and employee appraisal. We find that TTOs report heterogeneous office objectives, processes, and structures. These differences matter for commercialization outcomes. For example, although there has been a push for process standardization, not all TTO tasks are equally well suited to systematization.

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Peer-Reviewed Publications

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Turnover, Loyalty and Competence in the West Wing: The Trump White House in Historical Context (Pres. Studies Quarterly, 2021)

with Matthew Dickinson

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

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Striking the Balance: University Commercialization and Scientific Research Productivity (Stanford J. of Law, Econ., and Bus., 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

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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.

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Other Publications

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Change and Continuity in White House Staffing: The Trump Factor (De Gruyter, 2021)

with Matthew Dickinson

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)

with 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)

with Matthew Dickinson

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.​​