Does Shared Capitalism Work?

Does Shared Capitalism Work?, no Economist's View:

But what would come next? One possibility is employee ownership. At first glance it appears to provide better incentives to workers than wages, but more thought leads to a consideration of free riding problems - if everyone but you works really hard you will still receive a large profit share - and it was never clear how such a system could work in its pure form since the entrepreneurial function would be absent. (...)

Despite those problems, however, employee ownership is growing in popularity:

Does shared capitalism work in the United Kingdom?, no Vox:

Of course it does. Isn’t John Lewis the best store in the world?

Of course it doesn’t. Except for John Lewis, the best store in the world.

Shared capitalism, by which we mean firms that pay all or almost all employees in part on the basis of performance of their enterprise or workplace, has traditionally been viewed as a niche part of an economy; John Lewis in the United Kingdom, Mondragon in Spain, and at one point United Airlines in the United States. In its 1991 PEPPER (Promotion of Employee Participation in Profits and Enterprise Results) Report and in ensuing reports, the European Union endorsed ownership and profit sharing.

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Some of the growth in share ownership in Britain over the last quarter century (and in Employee Stock Ownership Plans in the United States) is attributable to government tax privileges given to firms that pay workers with ownership stakes. But some of the growth is also part of a movement towards incentivising workers through collective forms of pay (Bryson, Pendleton and Whitfield, 2008). Despite the United Airlines bankruptcy, overall employee ownership in the US has not fallen. In the United Kingdom, an increasing number of firms, some with very different ownership models, have joined the Employee Ownership Association, which represents the growing co-owned sector.

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But share ownership and other forms of shared capitalism are large and growing. Shared capitalist enterprises are meeting the market test. So do they really lead to better performance?

Isolating the effects of share ownership on performance through econometrics is tricky. Estimating production functions or profit functions from administrative or survey data is subject to all sorts of problems. Firms do not choose the schemes randomly. Nor do they choose other inputs randomly. Share capitalist companies may be those that have identified benefits in sharing the rewards of company performance with their employees, but other firms have chosen to be “lean and mean” because that pays off for them. Many believe that the firms adopting share schemes have more sophisticated managements than firms that do not, and that it is that management leadership that really matters, not the scheme.

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The findings on shared capitalism in the United Kingdom mirror , to a considerable extent, results from the United States in the 2000s. Researchers at NBER went beyond the production function methodology to survey tens of thousands of workers in firms concerned about what makes shared capitalism work more or less effectively under a research project on ”Shared Capitalism” (Blasi, Freeman, Kruse, 2008). The research, to be published as an NBER volume in 2009, shows that shared capitalism improves outcomes for companies and their workers. For example, owning company stock strongly predicts both an innovation culture and willingness to engage in innovative activity. They also find that shared capitalism and high performance work policies have stronger effects in predicting an innovation culture when they are combined in a setting that encourages worker co-monitoring.

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We have learned a lot about shared capitalism schemes as a result of this recent research but much still remains to be understood. Firms often change the specific schemes they use. The schemes appear to have larger positive effects in some sectors and firms than in others (with almost no evidence of any negative effects). Absent experimental data, it is possible that the analyses have not identified true causal effects on performance.

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