Ownership and decision-making are key issues in the economic restructuring taking place as economies struggle to emerge from the Great Recession, and technological change and globalization continue to place new demands on workers and firms. Corporate, labor, and policy leaders are increasingly recognizing the potential role of employee ownership, cooperatives, profit sharing, and other ways … Read More
This study, which consists of two essays, examines the performance effects of a deferred equity plan on both individual employee and business unit outcomes. The first essay investigates the effects of deferred compensation plan characteristics on voluntary turnover decisions, using detailed data on store-level employees of a large retail firm. Overall, I find that employees … Read More
This film tells the little known stories of employee-owned businesses that compete successfully in today’s economy while providing secure, dignified jobs in democratic workplaces. The film highlights examples including Mondragon in the Basque Country in Spain and the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland, Ohio, as well as smaller businesses including coffee shops and bakeries.
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…
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.
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.
The ESOP Association Canada is a non-profit organization founded to promote the concept of employee ownership for business in Canada.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This study empirically investigates the value employees place on stock options using information from the option exercise behavior of individuals
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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