A major theoretical objection against employee ownership is that workers become inadequately diversified and exposed to excessive financial risk. Recent theory concludes that 10-15% of a worker's wealth portfolio can be prudently invested in employer stock provided the rest of the portfolio is...

In this paper, we study the effects of business culture on market efficiency. We exogenously vary the type of business culture between business-is-business cultures, which consist on impersonal relationships where financial matters are paramount, and business-is-family cultures, which comprise...

Organization theorists identify organizational social capital as one of the primary building blocks of a potentially powerful resource for improving organizational performance. However, little is known about the impact of the socio-emotional skills of the employees within their social capital...

Available wisdom suggests that a negative relationship prevails between economic freedom and perceived corruption among firms. However, the relationship is far from linear and a number of complex interactions make it fairly nuanced. We show that greater competition may accentuate the problem of...

Whilst existing efficiency wage literature assumes detection probabilities of shirkers are exogenous, this paper finds them positively and endogenously dependent on non-shirkers' effort. It shares the result with the endogenous monitoring models where, in some regions, workers reduce effort in...

While intuition suggests that empowering workers to have some say in the control of the firm is likely to have beneficial incentive effects, empirical evidence of such an effect is hard to come by because of numerous confounding factors in the naturally occurring data. We report evidence from a...

We build a model of worker interdependence in which two workers can either compete or cooperate and compare performance under either scenario to that of a single worker working in isolation. We show that whilst competition unequivocally reduces performance, cooperation may raise or lower...

Are high-ability individuals more likely to quit egalitarian regimes? Does the threat of exit by talented individuals restrict the redistributive capacity of democratic organizations? This paper revisits that long-standing debate by analyzing the interplay between compensation structure and quit...

The conditions under which profit sharing affects workplace productivity have never been fully understood. Using panel data, this paper examines whether there is any link between adoption of an employee profit sharing plan and subsequent productivity growth in Canadian establishments, and...

A worker co-operative is a firm that is owned and managed by those who work in it. This paper provides a selective review of research in economics on worker cooperatives. It concentrates on the volatility of earnings and employment in the co-ops compared with conventional capitalist firms; on...