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...

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...

This paper examines the effects of upgrading product quality standards on product and professional labor-market equilibriums when both markets are regulated. The Japanese government revised the Building Standards Act in June 2007, requiring a stricter review process for admitting the plans of...

We examine the effect of enforcing minimum quality standards (MQSs) on consumer health. In the late 1800s, the urban milk supply was regularly skimmed and diluted with water, but consumers could not easily determine its quality because dyes, caramel, and salt were added. To protect consumers,...

Minimum quality regulations are often justified in the child care market because of the presence of information frictions between parents and providers. However, regulations can also have unintended consequences for the quantity and quality of services provided. In this paper, we merge new data...

Differences in wages, employment, and capital between worker-owned and capitalist enterprises are computed from a matched employer-worker panel data set from Italy, the market economy with the greatest incidence of worker-owned and worker-managed firms. These differences are related to orthodox...

This field experiment examines output quantity and quality for workers in a data input business. We observe two sets of workers that differ in monitoring intensity as they move from time to piece rates. The application of piece rates increases quantity, and we find that the resultant quality can...

This paper presents a tractable formalization and an empirical investigation of the quality-complementarity hypothesis, the hypothesis that input quality and plant productivity are complementary in generating output quality. We embed this complementarity in a general-equilibrium trade model with...

This paper investigates the link between product quality and price setting for central processing units (CPUs). Using thousands of price quotes from a popular price-comparison website, we find that market fundamentals, such as the number of sellers, median price, share of convenient prices and...

To investigate the size and the timing of the direct impact of participatory arrangements on business performance, we assemble and analyze extraordinary daily data - for rejection, production and downtime rates for all operators in a single plant during a 35 month period, more than 77,000...