A new conceptual framework to define and differentiate among diverse forms of employee ownership is developed. Two central rights associated with ownership, return and control rights, are identified. Their impact on individual motivation, individual performance, organizational structural variables and organizational performance is evaluated. We show how, over certain ranges of combinations of control and return rights, the relationship between alternative ownership arrangements and organizational performance may be nonlinear. The implications for the introduction of employee ownership and the evaluation of empirical work are considered.

By assembling and analyzing new panel data, we investigate the impact of innovative human resource management (HRM) practices on performance for a retail firm. Monthly financial and performance data for 2001-2003, for all (47) units, are combined with information for crucial aspects of HRM environments obtained from employee surveys and multiple case visits. Our rich data include measures of the operating environment, important dimensions of core inputs and output is measured as value added. Augmented production functions, including specifications with both establishment and manager fixed effects, are estimated. We find that when employees have opportunities to participate, receive appropriate information and pertinent rewards, productivity is enhanced. Thus even in settings where employees do simple tasks and employees are relatively low-skilled our findings provide more solid support than many earlier studies for retailing and service firms that novel HRM practices can improve business performance. visits. Our rich data include measures of the operating environment, important dimensions of core inputs and output is measured as value added. Augmented production functions, including specifications with both establishment and manager fixed effects, are estimated. We find that when employees have opportunities to participate, receive appropriate information and pertinent rewards, productivity is enhanced. Thus even in settings where employees do simple tasks and employees are relatively low-skilled our findings provide more solid support than many earlier studies for retailing and service firms that novel HRM practices can improve business performance.

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Chinese city-level data indicate that differences in growth rates are far more severe than indicated in previous studies which typically use data at higher levels of aggregation. We estimate growth equations using city-level data and find that the policy of awarding a special economic zone status enhances growth substantially, increasing annual growth rates by 5.5 percentage points. Annual growth rates of open coastal cities are, on average, 3 percentage points higher. Our qualitative results on the role of policy and the effects of FDI are similar to those of earlier studies that have employed provincial-level data; but, quantitatively, our results are substantially different. We also provide evidence of an indirect role of policy in the growth process through its ability to attract growth-enhancing foreign direct investment.

The paper presents econometric estimates of productivity effects of various forms of worker participation in Western producer cooperatives. While the effects vary across institutional settings, the overall effect is found to be positive. The positive effects are found most uniformly with respect to profit sharing and, to a slightly lesser extent, individual capital (share) ownership and participation in decision-making by workers. The size of individual worker loans to the coop is unrelated to productivity, while collective capital ownership exhibits an insignificant or a negative productivity effect.