Re-booting Capitalism: The Action Agenda for Business
Capitalism is living in interesting times. Politicians, academics and activists around the world are debating the merits of the capitalist system, and how and if it could be improved…
Center for Economic and Social Justice
The Center for Economic and Social Justice is a non-profit, non-partisan education and research organization dedicated to promoting economic justice on a global scale by expanding capital ownership to a broader segment of society.
The Kelso Institute
Louis O. Kelso (1913-91) was a political economist in the classical tradition of Smith, Marx and Keynes. He was also a corporate and financial lawyer, author, lecturer and merchant banker who is chiefly remembered today as the inventor and pioneer of the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), the prototype of the leveraged buy-out which Kelso invented to enable working people without savings to buy stock in their employer company and pay for it out of its future dividend yield.
ESOP Association Canada
The ESOP Association Canada is a non-profit organization founded to promote the concept of employee ownership for business in Canada.
Reinventing the Firm
Presenting a wide range of quantitative data alongside three new case studies of employee-owned firms, this pamphlet offers a new vision of economic autonomy where democratic companies drive a happier and more sustainable economy.
Converting Failed Financial Institutions into Mutual Organisations
There are three reasons for promoting mutual building societies: they are less prone than banks to pursue risky speculative activity; a mixed system produces a more stable financial sector; and a stronger mutual sector enhances competition within the financial system.
When Workers Share in Profits: Effort and Responses to Shirking
This paper summarizes new evidence from the “Shared Capitalism” Project on the extent to which workers’ earnings depend on the performance of their firm or work group in the US and advanced European countries and on the impact of sharing arrangements on economic behavior.
Employee Financial Participation in the New Member States
This report looks at the current situation in relation to employee financial participation (EFP) and its recent developments in the new Member States (NMS) of the EU: Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.
The Value of Stock Options to Non-Executive Employees
This study empirically investigates the value employees place on stock options using information from the option exercise behavior of individuals
Binary Economics: The Economic Theory that Gave Rise to ESOPs
ESOPs are part of a broader approach to expanded capital ownership, broader prosperity, and economic justice known as binary economics. Binary economics was first advanced by Louis Kelso, who is also widely known as the inventor of the ESOP.
Productivity in Cooperatives and Worker-owned Enterprises: Ownership and Participation Make a Difference!
The survival rate of worker cooperatives and employee-owned firms in market economics appears to equal or surpass that of conventional firms. But they typically return a different combination of economic benefits to their member-owners than do conventional firms…
Democratic Capitalism: The Way to a World of Peace and Plenty
Democratic Capitalism combines the free-market energies of competition and private property with the enormous productivity and innovation released in an environment of trust and cooperation. Ray Carey presents the theory and practice of democratic capitalism by coupling his experience with a synthesis of the thought of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill.
Third-Sector Development: Making Up for the Market
Nonprofit corporations, cooperatives, and credit unions constitute an alternative avenue of hope and action for communities that have come up short in the normal operation of the market economy. These organizations comprise the third sector, which accounts for approximately 10 percent of U.S. economic activity.
Motivating Employee-Owners in ESOP Firms: Human Resource Policies and Company Performance
The growth of ESOPs over the past 25 years is part of a general growth in compensation arrangements linking worker pay to company performance, including profit sharing, gain-sharing, and broad-based stock options in addition to the various methods of employee ownership.
Broad-Based Employee Stock Options in US ‘New Economy’ Firms
This paper compares the performance of 229 `New Economy’ firms offering broad-based stock options to that of their non-stock option counterparts. A simple comparison of these firms reveals that the former have higher shareholder returns, Tobin’s q and new knowledge generation.
Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: Promoting Employee Ownership at the Subnational Level
There are at least six reasons why we should be concerned with encouraging employee ownership at thesubnational level: at the level of the state, the province, the region, the municipality, or other subnationalgovernmental units or at the level of the industrial branch, cutting across governmental geographic units.
Cooperative Firms in Theory and Practice
Cooperatives are not, as everyone at this conference knows, just a peripheral or incidental or anachronistic or culturally limited form of organization. Rather, they are big business of a distinctly modern type.
Theoretical and Empirical Studies of Producer Cooperatives: Will Ever the Twain Meet?
Producer cooperatives (hereafter, PC) have existed in Western economies since the advent of the factory system. The oldest surviving PCs in the U.K. and Italy are over one hundred years old. By analyzing the theoretical properties of PCs, economists hope to assess whether popularization of the PC form, or transplantation of some of its characteristics into other organizations, would benefit or harm social welfare.
The Economic Effects of Profit Sharing in Great Britain
There are a number of ways to have workers’ remuneration linked more readily with firms’ commercial performance. One is to link wages to profits by using cash-based profit sharing (where workers are made cash payments which vary with employer’s profitability). A second is to have workers paid partly in their firms’ own shares. A third, and more extreme alternative, is producer co-operatives where workers participate in profits, ownership and decision-making. In this article we examine both the theoretical and empirical evidence in support of such schemes.
The Democratic Worker-Owned Firm: A New Model for the East and West
When this book was first published in 1990, there were massive economic changes in the East and significant economic challenges to the West. This critical analysis of democratic theory discusses the principles and forces that push both socialist and capitalist economies toward a common ground of workplace democratization. This book is a comprehensive approach to … Read More