Working Paper Series

“We are pleased to announce a new Working Paper Series featuring research papers by Fellows and Guest Scholars of the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at the School of Management and Labor Relations. The papers represent important new scholarship related to broadening share ownership. These are “working” papers; they have been presented in conferences for initial comment but have not undergone peer review.”

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

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

Defining Employee Ownership: Four Meanings and Two Models (Working Paper #3)

Christopher Mackin | January, 2023

The field of broad-based employee ownership within corporations is a specific application of the foundational topic of property ownership. It is situated at the intersection of a broad range of scholarly disciplines including economics, law, finance and management. Each discipline contributes vocabulary and distinctions describing this field. That broad spectrum of disciplinary inquiry is a … Read More