The Effects of Mandatory Profit-Sharing on Workers and Firms: Evidence from France

Climbing the Ivory Tower: How Socio-Economic Background Shapes Academia

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.

The Impact of Unconditional Cash Transfers on Consumption and Household Balance Sheets: Experimental Evidence from Two US States

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.

Algorithms As a Vehicle to Reflective Equilibrium:‬ Behavioral Economics 2.0

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.

Science in the Age of Algorithms

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.

Writing Code vs. Shipping Code: Productivity Effects Across Generations of AI Coding Tools

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.

Investing in Enterprises That Work for Everyone (SSIR)

Impact investors can support a more just economy by prioritizing alternative ownership enterprises that shift power away from shareholders to workers, the community, and the planet. <meta property=

When Does Worker Ownership Work? ESOPs, Law Firms, Codetermination, and Economic Democracy

Denizen / Post-Growth Economics (Deep Dive)

Rather than money accumulating into fewer private hands, not-for-profit businesses loop their profits back into the economy. Rather than money going into someone’s bank account, it comes back into the system. This is not the same as a non-profit, which may not have a business model. These are businesses that make a profit but do not extract that capital but rather circulate it

Overcoming Barriers to Employee Ownership: Insights From Small and Medium-Sized Businesses

This research investigates the limited adoption of employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) among small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) in the U.S. Through interviews with 30 SMB owners across various industries, we identify the key barriers to ESOP adoption as lack of time, money, and skills on the part of the owners. In doing so, the study suggests that a “shared ownership light” model, which involves sharing profits, information, and decision-making opportunities with employees, appears more feasible for SMBs than ESOPs. For SMBs that are interested in ESOP adoption, our research suggests that organizations providing employee ownership services could better assist SMBs by offering templatized models and best practices for profit-sharing plans, open-book management, and structured employee participation. The paper aims to broaden the discussion around shared ownership by considering a spectrum of options that have the potential to increase both value creation by and value-sharing among employees.

WSJ News Exclusive | Private-Equity Giants Back New Nonprofit Promoting Employee Ownership

More than 60 groups, including banks and pension funds, have also signed on to support Ownership Works, which aims to promote broad-based stock ownership as a means of curbing income inequality.

The corporation—a return to origins?

This paper contributes to contemporary debates in political theory about the power of business corporations by offering a genealogy of the corporation through the lens of a series of historical mutations of the corporate form. Originally, there were two corporate forms, both non-profit: member corporations (today's associations) and property corporations (today's charitable foundations). The contemporary business corporation arguably is a hybrid of both of these original forms, introducing unique commercial features (shares with profit distribution rights that are transferable). These commercial features are largely responsible for the corporation's extractive nature, that is, its tendency to prey on non-shareholder interests. The future of the corporation may well lie in a partial return to the two original non-profit forms. Two corporate forms developed in the nineteenth century can provide the format for such a return: cooperatives (which reinforce the idea of membership) and foundation-owned companies. The cooperative structure is a halfway house between a business corporation and a member corporation (association), and in a parallel fashion, a foundation-owned company is a halfway house between a business corporation and a property corporation (foundation). If we want to reduce corporations’ extractive nature, facilitating the spread of cooperatives and foundation-owned companies seems the way forward.

CanInnovate | Kyle Briggs | Substack

I write about innovation, entrepreneurship, intellectual property, and related policy. I comment on the incentives created by existing policy structures and recommend practical ways to enact positive change. Click to read CanInnovate, by Kyle Briggs, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.

CMV: The labor theory of value is flawed

72 votes, 407 comments. This might be an obscure topic, however, in some—largely Marxist circles— the approach seems to motivate much of the dialogue…

Work, Justice, and Collective Capital Institutions: Revisiting Rudolf Meidner and the Case for <span style="font-variant:small-caps;">Wage‐Earner</span> Funds

ABSTRACT This article makes the case for a specific variety of what we call Collective Capital Institutions (CCIs), by returning to the idea of Wage‐Earner Funds (WEFs) – a 1970s Swedish policy proposal designed gradually to shift ownership and control over parts of the economy to democratically controlled institutions. We identify two attractive rationales in favour of such a scheme and argue that both can fruitfully be transposed to the current worldwide economic situation. The egalitarian rationale is that WEFs could help in the pursuit of equality by giving a wider set of people a stake in collectively owned companies and a right to their profits. The democratic rationale is that WEFs redistribute not only these profits, but also the power over economic decisions made within companies. We then contrast such schemes for collective capital ownership with the similar but much more privatised proposals set out in, for instance, John Rawls's idea of a ‘property‐owning democracy’. We argue that CCIs ultimately are more likely to contribute to the development of the ‘sense of justice’ within society that is needed for a stable just society. We conclude that CCIs deserve a great deal more exploration in academic and political discussions of egalitarian economic systems.