This study uses a 10-year longitudinal database on U.S. manufacturing establishments to analyze the dynamics of the adoption and termination of employee involvement programs (EI). We show that firms' use of EI has not grown continuously, but rather introduce and terminate EI policies in ways...

Who should control the firm? What should be the firm's objective function? If contracts are incomplete, then the group of input providers that most needs their interests protected should be allocated control rights to the firm. Existing theories argue that the suppliers of capital are most in...

We estimate the wage effects of shared governance, or codetermination, in the form of a mandate of one third of corporate board seats going to worker representatives. We study a reformin Germany that abruptly abolished this mandate for stock corporations incorporated after August 1994, while it...

A great many American firms have organized workplace decision-making in new ways to get employees more involved in their jobs -- using policies like self-directed work teams, total equality management, quality circles, profit-sharing, and diverse other programs. This paper uses a firm-based data...

Using data from a unique nationally representative sample of businesses, the Educational Quality of the Workforce National Employers Survey (EQW-NES), matched with the Bureau of the Census' Longitudinal Research Database (LRD), we examine the impact of workplace practices, information technology...

This paper reviews workforce participation in strategic decisions - those that affect the basic direction of the company - when workforce interests are represented collectively through unions. We consider the problem of corporate governance and review the rationale for what we term strategic...

Using both quantitative data from national surveys and qualitative data from our own field research, this paper provides evidence on changes in participatory employment practices in Japan during the economic slowdown in the 1990s. Overall, consistent with the complementarity of such practices...