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Does Employee Ownership Improve Performance? Employee Ownership Generally Increases Firm Performance and Worker Outcomes

Douglas Kruse | May, 2022

Employee ownership has attracted growing attention for its potential to improve economic outcomes for companies, workers, and the economy in general, and help reduce inequality. Over 100 studies across many countries indicate that employee ownership is generally linked to better productivity, pay, job stability, and firm survival—though the effects are dispersed and causation is difficult … Read More

Implementing Universal Capital Accounts in the U.S.: Fixing Our Broken Income Distribution System (Working Paper #2)

Roland M. Attenborough | February, 2022

The concentration of ownership by the very wealthy is supported by a financial system that enables them to acquire income-producing capital basically on credit whereas no such financing strategy is available to the mass of the population. A solution lies in creating a system whereby every individual has the right and opportunity to acquire income-producing … Read More

Gender- and Race-Based Inequalities in Democratic Worker-Owned Firms: Evidence from the First National Survey of the Sector (Working Paper #1)

Laura Hanson Schlachter, Sarah Reibstein | February, 2022

Worker cooperative practitioners and developers often claim that democratic worker ownership advances egalitarianism within and beyond the workplace, but most of the empirical evidence in the U.S. is based on ethnographic case studies or small-scale surveys. We leverage the first national survey about individuals’ experiences in these unique firms to ask if claims that co-ops … Read More

Inter-Collegiate Seminar on Teaching Inclusive Capitalism

Robert Ashford | December, 2021

This two day seminar will examine a new form of Inclusive Capitalism founded on a broader distribution of capital acquisition and fuller employment.  This two-day virtual event brought together professors of economics and other disciplines from numerous universities to discuss the creation of a teaching and research agenda centered around Inclusive Capitalism.

Understanding the Opportunities for Employee Ownership Among Minority Veteran-Owned Businesses

Kyra Sutton, Oyindamola Daramola, William Castellano | December, 2021

The United States business sector is dominated by small businesses that create new jobs at a rate considered faster than that of their larger competitors. Remarkably, military veterans own nearly 13 percent of small businesses. However, only eight percent of all veteran-owned firms are minority owned. The low percentage of minority-owned veteran businesses is perplexing … Read More

Mini-Case Study: National Van Lines

Adria Scharf | November, 2021

This mini-case study examines employee share ownership at National Van Lines, where an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) provided a family-run business a succession plan that ensured the continuation of the company and protected employee jobs. Just one-third of family businesses successfully transition from the first to the second generation of ownership and only 12% … Read More

Company Profile: S&C Electric Company

Adria Scharf | November, 2021

This mini-case study examines S&C Electric Company, the storied Chicago-based employee-owned company that was founded in 1911.  The mini-case study introduces the company’s history and describes how employee ownership preserved the company and its jobs during a key generational transition.

“Here, You Earn It”: Employee Ownership at Parksite, Inc.

Adria Scharf | October, 2021

This case study examines employee share ownership at Parksite, Inc., where the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) is paired with a strong company culture and high job quality. For the company’s co-founders, the ESOP provided a solution to a major transition challenge. The company’s long-term employees accumulate considerable stock wealth through the ESOP. Discussion questions … Read More

Case Study: North State Grocery

Adria Scharf | October, 2021

This case study examines employee share ownership at North State Grocery, where the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) solved a transition challenge in a company owned by two siblings. Thanks to the ESOP, long-term employees, including frontline staff such as cashiers and bakery workers, build a larger cushion of retirement savings than is typical in … Read More

Case Study: Central States Manufacturing, Inc.

Adria Scharf | October, 2021

This case study examines employee share ownership at Central States Manufacturing, where the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) shares stunning sums of wealth with employees. Central States designs its ESOP to allow participants to access a portion of their ownership wealth while they are still employed at the company, through hardship and service withdrawals. This … Read More

Employee Ownership and Wealth Inequality: A Path to Reducing Wealth Concentration

Ethan Rouen, Thomas Dudley | September, 2021

This paper examines the impact of an economy-wide shift to broad-based employee ownership on wealth concentration in the United States. Relying on government data, we show that if all private firms became 30% employee-owned, the wealth distribution would be profoundly altered. Those currently in the bottom 90% of the wealth distribution would see substantial gains, … Read More

The Gender Equity Gap: A Multistudy Investigation of Within-Job Inequality in Equity-Based Awards

Aaron Hill, Felice Klein, Ryan Hammond, Ryan Stice-Lusvardi | May, 2021

Laws in many countries mandate paying men and women equally when in similar jobs. Such laws, coupled with considerable organizational efforts, lead some scholars to contend that within-job pay inequality is no longer a source of the gender pay gap. This article argues important differences in a widely used form of pay heretofore overlooked in … Read More

Common Wealth Dividends: History and Theory

Brent Ranalli | April, 2021

Common wealth dividends are universal cash payments funded by fees on the private use of common resources like land, minerals, and the atmosphere as a carbon sink. Thomas Paine’s 1797 pamphlet Agrarian Justice and Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend are staples in the literature on Basic Income, but there is much more to common wealth dividends … Read More

The Case for Employee Ownership

Hilary Abell | May, 2020

The case for employee ownership is undisputed. As philanthropists and government leaders grapple with how to address both long-entrenched and newly-emerging forms of economic insecurity, there is no better time to look to effective but lesser-known solutions, such as employee ownership. Even before the economic crisis brought on by COVID-19, income and wealth inequality and downward economic mobility for frontline workers were truths so obvious that one could visually observe them in most communities. Now, more than ever, we need solutions that create economic resiliency for workers and local economies.

Having a Stake: Evidence and Implications for Broad-based Employee Stock Ownership and Profit Sharing

Douglas Kruse, Joseph Blasi, Richard B. Freeman | December, 2019

At the center of the ongoing debate about the causes and cures of inequality in America today is the vast difference in wealth between owners and workers. As many have noted, that gap was not nearly as large in the middle of the twentieth century as it has become in the first two decades of the 21st century, where owners and other executives make many multiples of what workers make – largely through grants of stock in lieu of salary.

Profit Sharing and Firm Profitability: The Differential Impact of Underlying Firm Profitability on the Wage-Profit Elasticity

Matthias Strifler | September, 2018

Purpose This purpose of this paper to examine how profit sharing depends on the underlying profitability of firms. More precisely, motivated by theoretical research on fair wages and unionized labor markets, profit sharing is estimated for six different profitability categories: positive, increasing, positive and increasing, negative, decreasing and negative or decreasing. Design/methodology/approach The paper exploits … Read More

Works Councils and Employer Attitudes Toward the Incentive Effects of HRM Practices

Uwe Jirjahn | September, 2018

Purpose A growing number of econometric examinations show that works councils substantially shape the personnel policy of firms in Germany. Firms with works councils make greater use of various human resource management (HRM) practices. This gives rise to the question of whether employers view the shaping of personnel policy positively or negatively. Against this background, … Read More

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