The purpose of this paper is to delve into three side-arguments or themes about democratic enterprises (as opposed to considering first principles). Approach: 1) The first theme is the question of capital structure where labor-managed firms are often pictured as having "horizon problem." Yet...

We develop a financial-contracting theory of the cooperative firm where production requires three generic tasks: working, managing, and monitoring. Workers provide an intermediate input (or labor directly); managers convert the workers' input into a final output; and directors monitor managers....

The Oxford Handbook of Mutuals and Co-Owned Business investigates all types of 'member owned' organizations, whether consumer co-operatives, agricultural and producer co-operatives, worker co-operatives, mutual building societies, friendly societies, credit unions, solidarity organizations,...

Worker cooperatives—firms owned and governed by their workers—have experimented with organizational structure in aid of greater equality. Gender theorists and cooperativists have argued that bureaucracy produces inequality, but bureaucracy has also demonstrably reduced organizational...

This paper describes the intersection of class, gender and race in the leadership of cooperatives in North America. Movement of labour across North American borders changes the membership of cooperatives as well as the leadership and formation of cooperatives. The socio-economic shifts that...

This paper relates firm-level processes and size distributions of firms at the industry level. An analytically tractable model explores how firm growth, exit, and spinoff activity in combination with systematically appearing growth crises in organizational development translate into specific...

The behaviour of an oligopolistic industry in a transition economy is analysed, assuming that the firms are labour-managed and the economy is open to international trade. The output of these firms is assumed to be of lower quality than the output of Western firms. Cournot equilibrium in the...

This study shows that for firms in the Latin America and Caribbean region, bribery significantly distorts firm growth. Firms that were solicited for bribes when conducting business transactions – such as applying for permits, electricity, or water connections – have 23% lower annual sales...

Entrepreneurship is essential for a healthy labor market. Recent evidence shows that young businesses (at most ten years old) have, on average, accounted for all of US employment growth over the past few decades. New businesses are especially important for youth employment. However, these...

A small proportion of high growth firms create the majority of all new jobs. For policymakers, it is important to know (1) the obstacles faced by high growth firms are and (2) the obstacles faced by firms with the potential to achieve high growth, but which are yet to achieve this. This...