This article examines nine U.S. healthcare businesses organized as worker cooperatives, analyzing variation in their ownership, governance, and organizational structures. Drawing on qualitative interview data from cooperatives operating in-home care, physical therapy, mental health, holistic health, and hospital support services, the study analyzes governance systems, membership criteria, compensation, and profit-sharing arrangements, managerial structures, and formal mechanisms for worker participation in decision-making. The purpose of the article is to assess how cooperative worker ownership operates within the institutional and market constraints of the U.S. healthcare sector, and to begin to identify the conditions under which such enterprises may achieve stability. Across cases, worker cooperatives introduce formalized channels for worker participation in domains that, in conventional healthcare firms, are typically reserved for management. At the same time, the cases reveal substantial organizational heterogeneity. A small number of cooperatives achieved scale, financial stability, and relatively robust benefit provision, while others remained small and operated with limited margins. Governance models ranged from hybrid forms combining democratic ownership with conventional managerial hierarchies to more collective nonhierarchical approaches to coordination and decision-making. All cooperatives benefited from ecosystem supports. All operated within institutional and competitive environments that affected growth.
How do socioeconomic-level factors relate to ESOP formation, persistence, and abandonment? This study examines employee ownership as a problem of prevalence rather than performance, with primary attention to the informal institutional contexts associated with new 100% ESOP adoption across U.S. states from 2019 to early 2024 and secondary attention to non-100% ESOP formation, survival, and exit. A legitimacy - enablement framework is developed in which attachment and standing provide legitimating foundations, while process and ownership readiness provide enabling conditions. Using hierarchical OLS, the study tests whether variation in 100% ESOP entry is associated with structural opportunity, formal institutions, geographic agglomeration, and informal institutions. Results suggest that strong-form employee ownership is most likely where ownership-transition opportunity, ESOP support infrastructure, and agglomeration are greater, and where informal institutional conditions are more supportive. Across the three prevalence phases, the framework is most powerful for explaining adoption rather than survival or exit. Attachment-related conditions matter through lower time-space distanciation and stronger family-firm socioemotional-wealth ecologies; standing is represented by inverse honor culture, the strongest sociocultural relationship; and employee engagement and an Ownership Readiness Index add further explanatory power. The study is among the first to position ESOPs as an institutional and sociocultural prevalence problem.
Social media (SM), while beneficial in many ways, also harms users and society at large. This paper concurs with the view that the key drivers of these harms, algorithmic and design choices to maximize engagement and the extraction of user data, are the result of profit-seeking unalloyed with other, mitigating motives. A brief review of actual and proposed countermeasures demonstrates that regulation of this dynamic and globalized sector is difficult. The main purpose of the paper is to describe an alternative approach centered on the use of publicly-financed purpose-based funds that would acquire ownership of sufficiently large SM enterprises. The key feature is that establishing multiple funds permits a diversity of social purposes rather than imposing a single objective on all of them. The paper hypothesizes that firms subject to the governance of these funds would be motivated to reduce harms and expand benefits relative to conventional ownership by private investors. Operational, financial and political challenges are identified and examined. At the end, the approach is assessed for its likely effectiveness, and questions are identified for future research.
Deciding how to sell a closely held business is one of the most consequential decisions business owners face. While most pursue familiar pathways such as private equity acquisition, strategic sale, or family succession, a smaller number sell their companies to employees through forms of employee ownership. This paper examines why some owners choose this less common exit strategy. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 23 business owners who transitioned ownership of their firms to employees - primarily through Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) - the study analyzes the financial, strategic, and values-based considerations shaping sellers' decisions. The findings suggest that owners often approach employee ownership through a two-stage process: an initial trigger such as retirement, partner exit, or liquidity needs prompts exploration of succession options, after which employee ownership emerges as attractive because it addresses those needs while also advancing broader priorities, including preserving jobs, maintaining firm independence, rewarding employees, and protecting business legacy. By centering the perspectives of sellers, the paper highlights owner decision-making as a critical but understudied factor in the diffusion of employee ownership.
The primary impediment to the further growth and realization of the broad-based employee ownership through the use of Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) in the United States has been the lack of access to equity capital by companies sponsoring ESOPs. The lack of access to equity capital stands apart from the important work of the ESOP research community which is centered around topics such as how ESOPs improve firm performance, attend to issues of worker voice and share wealth with employees. What the ESOP research community has yet to sufficiently appreciate is the extent to which barriers to growth also have to do with how difficult it is for ESOP sponsors to interact with capital markets. A capital markets approach to the issue of ESOP growth asks how ESOPs can grow in a sustainable, long-term fashion.
This paper revisits the contentious relationship between real exchange rate (RER) movements and long-run economic growth through a novel focus on sustained misalignments. Using a large panel dataset covering 124 countries from 1950 to 2019, we establish formal criteria to identify episodes of sustained RER undervaluation and overvaluation. Employing semiparametric estimation methods, event-study approaches, and robustness checks, we find consistent evidence that sustained undervaluations are associated with significant long-run expansions in real GDP per capita, particularly in developing economies. These effects are transmitted mainly through increases in the capital stock and shifts in the composition of spending towards investment. Conversely, overvaluation episodes tend to have weaker and more heterogeneous negative effects, although they tend to contribute to de-industrialisation through declines in the share of low-tech manufacturing exports. Our findings highlight the critical role of relative price dynamics in shaping structural transformation and challenge conventional views that undervaluations are merely distortive. By emphasising the historical and expectation-driven dimensions of RER movements, this study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the effect of exchange rate levels on economic growth in general and the trajectories of developing economies in particular.
This paper uses novel data from Ethiopian industrial parks to examine the impact of on-the-job training (OJT) on wage growth in manufacturing. Employing OLS and propensity score matching techniques on a unique employer-employee matched dataset, we find that OJT participation increases the probability of wage growth by 30-36% points, with effects robust to extensive controls. The wage effects operate through dual channels: enhanced technical competencies - particularly in specialized domains like ironing and factory cognitive skills - and improved conscientiousness, a key noncognitive trait linked to productivity. Heterogeneity analyses reveal substantially larger returns for male workers (coefficient of 0.714 versus 0.324 for females), younger employees, line workers, and those in parks with centralized labor allocation systems. This evidence suggests important complementarities between skill investments and institutional design while highlighting potential gender disparities in training benefits. Our findings contribute to understanding skill formation mechanisms in newly industrializing contexts, with implications for designing industrial policies that effectively distribute productivity gains between firms and workers. The results demonstrate how strategic skill investments can promote both industrial competitiveness and wage growth in labor-abundant developing economies.
In this study, we examine the relationship between ESG, firm quality and stock returns using data for 10 Asian markets from 2010 to 2024. We observe that high ESG firms are larger in size, report higher sales turnover and exhibit greater profitability and investment rates. High ESG stocks provide lower returns resulting in a greenium of 2.89% per annum. We find that investors rely more on recent ESG information rather than its long-term average and further, the relationship between ESG and returns is stronger for the short-term compared to the long-term holding period. Our findings confirm that an ESG-based quality measure is better than its traditional measure for portfolio construction. Furthermore, static quality measures do a better job than dynamic quality measures for sample data. From a policy and regulator perspective, Asian firms seem to be striving for higher ESG compliance, realizing its benefits. Investors also seem to value sustainability as they are willing to accept lower returns for ESG stocks. The observed greeniums have clear implications for the cost of equity and corporate valuations. Quality-based investment strategies perform better when one incorporates an ESG dimension resulting in portfolios which are both profitable as well as sustainable.
Learning in organizations occurs continuously through daily work, collaboration, coaching, feedback, and shared problem-solving. It is not limited to formal training and development, which is a familiar benchmark of human development. Learning Management provides a method to conceptualize and operationalize these varied learning experiences so organizations can deliver, manage, and measure the true value of knowledge transfer in a variety of instances. Learning Management is presented as the model that makes these capability gains visible. Employee ownership is used as a demonstration context to show how learning management's mechanisms can generate durable value. Employee Ownership firms consistently outperform peers, and recent research has identified the Critical Success Factors behind these outcomes. This paper argues that these Critical Success Factors can be intentionally operationalized from the onset of Employee Ownership, rather than left to emerge organically over time. Capturing the acquisition of tacit knowledge provides a form of competitive advantage, not just for organizations, but for individuals, teams, organizations, and even societies. The contribution is twofold: (1) Learning Management is advanced as a coherent, teachable architecture for human-capital development and valuation of all types; and (2) organizations that implement Learning Management practices will realize superior capability, resilience, and value creation.
Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), which give workers ownership interest in the company, have long been recognized as a mechanism that promotes wealth accumulation among non-executive workers, enhances labor management relations, and improves workplace attitudes. Despite such benefits to both employers and employees, the number of ESOPs in the U.S. has been stagnating for about a decade. Meanwhile, the number of other types of employee stock ownership has significantly increased in the same period. This study addresses the question of why the number of ESOPs and the covered employees are stagnating in the U.S. while other types of employee ownership are on the rise. Through a comparative analysis of employee ownership systems in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and South Korea, we identify structural differences in governance, financing, and tax incentives that shape the adoption and sustainability of employee ownership. The findings suggest that the stagnation of ESOP formation in the United States is not due to declining interest in employee ownership, but rather to the limitations of the U.S. model and the absence of alternative pathways. Policy recommendations are offered to support a more diverse and resilient employee ownership ecosystem.
While family firms tend to outperform nonfamily firms when using cash profit sharing, our understanding of their propensity to engage in cash profit sharing is limited. Drawing on the behavioral agency theory and the socioemotional wealth preservation literature, this study examines the propensity of family firms under different generations of familial leadership (founders vs. descendants) to engage in cash profit sharing. Essentially, founder and descendant leaders have distinct views of what it means to pursue family firm longevity in order to perpetuate the family dynasty, and these divergent views shape family firms' decision on cash profit sharing. Using a 5-year panel dataset of listed U.S. family and nonfamily firms, the findings demonstrate that family firm preferences regarding cash profit sharing vary based on the familial generation in charge. Specifically, founder-led family firms are less inclined to use cash profit sharing, as doing so limits the financial resources available to pursue a long-term growth approach. Conversely, family firms under descendant leadership are more apt to using cash profit sharing, which supports their desire for long-term stability in firm profits.
