This paper examines how shared capitalism compensation systems - those that link employee pay to company performance - affect diverse employee outcomes. It uses two data sets: the national GSS survey that provides a broad representative view of the extent of the programs; and the NBER Shared...

This paper uses data from NBER surveys of over 40,000 employees in hundreds of facilities in 14 firms and from employees on the 2002 and 2006 General Social Surveys to explore how shared compensation affects turnover, absenteeism, loyalty, worker effort, and other outcomes affecting workplace...

Employee stock purchase plans (ESPPs) are designed to promote employee stock ownership broadly within the firm and provide another tax-deferred vehicle for individual capital accumulation in addition to traditional pensions, 401(k)s, and stock options. We outline the individual and corporate tax...

Some analysts view risk as the Achilles Heel of employee ownership and to some extent variable pay plans such as profit sharing and gainsharing. Workers in such quot;shared capitalistquot; firms may invest too much of their wealth in the firm, contrary to the principle of diversification. This...

Between one-third and one-half of employees participate directly in company performance through profit sharing, gainsharing, employee ownership, or stock options. This flies in the face of concerns about the free rider problem and worker risk aversion in group incentives, and raises many...

A political miracle occurred when Germany was reunited, and at first glance an economic miracle has followed. Real incomes in the east have now reached the western level, and investment per capita has been much higher than in the west. However, every third deutschmark spent in the east has been...

We develop a model of firm learning in volatile markets with noisy signals and test its predictions using historical data from the Ifo Institute's Business Climate Survey. We find that firms' forecasts improve as they age. We also exploit German Reunification as a natural experiment where firms...