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Varieties Of Employee Ownership: Some Unintended Consequences Of Corporate Law And Labor Law, Aditi Bagchi

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Theories of employee ownership implicitly assume that its essential features are the same in all countries. In fact, employee ownership varies considerably across institutional environments. In this paper, I compare its development in the United States, Germany, and Sweden to show that the institutional background - in particular, the existing bodies of corporate and labor law - against which a program of employee ownership arises determines its course. Background institutions determine the cost of worker control over management, the cost of collective decision-making, and the expected gains from risk-bearing. Those consequences of corporate and labor law in turn determine whether …