Modern economies deprive workers of natural democratic rights and any share of the surplus they produce, with most of the benefits of growth appropriated by capital owners. Worker wellbeing and job satisfaction are ignored unless they contribute directly to profitability, while precarious...

We report the first results for Korean firms on the incidence, diffusion, scope and effects of diverse employee financial participation schemes, such as Profit Sharing Plans (PSPs), Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), Stock Option Plans (SOPs) and Team Incentive Plans (TIPs). In do doing, we...

We provide the first econometric study of efficiency for a member of the Mondragon group of worker cooperatives. Eroski is a retail distribution chain and, most unusually, there are two distinct types of hypermarkets: (i) cooperatives with significant employee ownership and voice; and (ii) GESPAs...

Studies have found evidence that seemingly irrelevant details of an income component such as its label have an effect on how it is used. Using a data set with more than one million employee-month observations, we investigate the role of functional form assumptions and time aggregation in the...

Many large listed firms offer workers the opportunity to buy shares in the firm at discounted rates through employee stock purchase plans (ESPP). The discounted rate creates a gift exchange, where the firm hopes that workers who accept the gift reciprocate with greater loyalty and effort. But...

This paper provides novel evidence on the effects of employee stock ownership (ESO), a prominent example of shared capitalism. In so doing, we take advantage of our access to new panel data on Japanese ESO plans for a highly representative sample of publicly-traded firms in Japan (covering more...

Using detailed administrative data from Spain, we investigate the impact of having an initial work experience in an employee-owned firm (EOF) versus a conventional business on subsequent earnings. We find that young workers' exposure to EOFs at the time of labour market entry reduces earnings by...

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...

Since there is scant evidence on the role of industrial relations in wage cyclicality, this paper analyzes the effect of collective wage contracts and of works councils on real wage growth. Using linked employer-employee data for western Germany, we find that works councils affect wage growth...

This study examines differences in employment growth between firms with and without works councils by separating introduction effects from potential selectivity effects. Using a difference in differences framework, we show that firms with works councils have higher employment growth before...