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The field of broad-based employee ownership within corporations is a specific application of the foundational topic of property ownership. It is situated at the intersection of a broad range of scholarly disciplines including economics, law, finance and management. Each discipline contributes vocabulary and distinctions describing this field. That broad spectrum of disciplinary inquiry is a strength but it also lends a “ships passing in the night” quality to discussions of employee ownership. This paper attempts to unravel the narrative diversity surrounding this topic. Four meanings of ownership are introduced. Those meanings are in turn embedded within two abstract models of the corporation; the corporation as property and the corporation as social institution.

There is no experimental design The paper presents a conceptual overview and introduces a taxonomy of four meanings and two models of ownership.

Four meanings of ownership are introduced. The meanings are ownership as compensation, investment, retirement and membership. Those meanings are in turn embedded within two abstract models of the corporation; the corporation as property and the corporation as social institution.

No hypotheses are advanced. This is not a research paper. A conceptual overview that makes use of taxonomy of meanings and models is introduced to help clarify confusions abundant in the field of employee ownership. Readers may differ with the categories of meanings and models introduced in this conceptual overview.

The ambition of the paper is to describe the various meanings and models of employee ownership presently in use in both academic and applied settings. It is not necessary or desirable to assert the primacy of a single meaning or model in order to achieve progress. The analysis provided here surfaces a range of assumptions about ownership that have heretofore been implicit in both scholarship and in practice. Making those assumptions explicit should prove useful to both scholars and practitioners of employee ownership.

The concept of employee ownership enjoys a relatively broad appeal with the public. Among the academic disciplines that have trained their lights upon it, a more mixed reception prevails. Much of the academic and policy controversy derives from confusion about the nature and structure of employee ownership. This paper attempts to address that confusion by presenting a taxonomy of meanings and models that may prove useful for future research.

This study is one of the first efforts to comprehinsively map the various meanings and models of broad-based employee ownership.

The paper traces the development of employee ownership in the UK since the 1980s. It proposes that employee ownership is a function of macro-level contexts and micro-level decisions, with the latter framed and guided by the former. The macro context comprises the regulatory framework and the provision of incentives to adopt employee ownership. The paper shows how the evolution of these has led to a steep increase in employee ownership in the last eight years.

The paper draws on several sources of empirical data to chart the development of employee ownership in the UK since the 1980s and to identify the current features of employee ownership. Two firm-level surveys conducted in 2015 and 2020/21 are supplemented by qualitative case study data collected in the early 1990s. An annual census of all employee-owned firms facilitates a comprehensive overview of the current state of UK employee ownership.

It is found that there has been a steep increase in the number of UK employee-owned firms since 2014 after several decades of uneven growth. This is attributed to the introduction of new incentives and to refinements of the regulatory framework. Over the period, there has been a shift from hybrid employee ownership, combining direct and indirect forms, to indirect ownership associated with the employee ownership trust model.

The paper provides an original history of employee ownership in the UK using rich and unique data, along with the most comprehensive picture of current employee ownership to date.

With the UK’s accelerating plans to transition to electric mobility, this paper aims to highlight the need for policies to prepare for appropriate management of electric vehicle (EV) lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) as they reach the end of their life.

This is a regulatory review based on projections of EV LIBs coming off the market and associated problems of waste management together with the development of a servitisation model.

Circular economy in EV LIBs is unlikely to shape itself because LIB recycling is challenging and still in development. LIB volumes are insufficient for recycling to be currently profitable, and a circular economy here will need to be driven by regulatory intervention. Ignoring the problem carries potentially high environmental and health costs. This paper offers potential solutions through new EV ownership models to facilitate a circular economy.

The authors suggest a new EV ownership model. However, despite environmental benefits, re-shaping the fundamentals of market economies can have disruptive effects on current markets. Therefore, further exploration of this topic is needed. Also, the data presented is based on future projections of EV markets, battery lifespan, etc., which are uncertain at present. These are to be taken as estimates only.

The paper proposes regulatory interventions or incentives to fundamentally change consumer ideas of property ownership for EVs, so that EV automotive batteries remain the property of the manufacturer even when the consumer owns the car.

Prior literature shows that income shifting is widely performed by multinational groups, but no research as yet has studied alignment between controlling and minority interests on tax avoidance in multinational groups with high ownership concentration. This study aims to analyze the effect of high ownership concentration on cross-jurisdictional tax-motivated income shifting.

To test the hypotheses, this study focuses on European multinational groups. Data are collected on European parent firms and each subsidiary. The model considers the natural logarithm of profit before tax and tax incentive.

Findings show that subsidiaries shift income for tax avoidance purposes. The alignment of shareholders’ interests and ownership concentration leads to higher levels of tax avoidance through subsidiaries’ infra-group transactions. High ownership concentration decreases the influence of minority interests and allows parent company shareholders to choose a tax avoidance strategy more freely.

The results suggest that taxation levels need to be harmonized to reduce the incentive for tax avoidance and the incentive of governments to reduce their statutory tax rate, to shift profits inwards and reduce outward flow. Without international coordination, this approach may lead to the unevenness of legislative frameworks around the world, and bring significant disadvantages for some countries, influencing economic growth and business development.

This study extends prior findings showing that tax-motivated income shifting as a method of tax avoidance in European multinational groups is stronger in groups with high levels of ownership concentration. This means that managers have the incentive to shift income between subsidiaries for tax and ownership benefits in favor of the parent company’s shareholders and against minority interests.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between different types of shareholders that command share ownership, family, institutions or external blockholders and earnings management. In addition, it examines the effect of company size on earnings management.

The sample includes 67 companies listed in the Mexican Stock Exchange for the period 2005-2015. The sample composition is quite industry-balanced. A cross-sectional version of the Jones model (1991) is to measure the earnings management. The GMM (generalized method of moments) model is also estimated.

The results show that family and institutional ownership reduce the earnings management, but the impact is different depending on the company size.

The results show that there is a clear relationship between increasing participation of family and institutional investors and a reduction in earnings management. This is consistent with the literature that establishes that ownership is an effective regulatory mechanism that limits earnings management through closer supervision and involvement in management.

For companies’ corporate governance and regulatory authorities, the results of this study may serve to improve the decision-making.

This study shows that ownership structure can provide corporate governance in Mexican listed companies with different monitoring and control capacities to influence companies’ strategies, particularly in relation to the discretion of earnings management.

The authors investigate how foreign investment in securities market informs about the future firm performance in emerging markets.

The authors define the independent variable, abnormal foreign investment (AFI) as the residuals of the foreign ownership equation. The authors regress foreign ownership on its first lag and factors and define the residuals as the AFI. The AFI is the over- or under-investment reflecting foreign conscious (clear-purpose) investment, thus better indicating how foreign investment affects firm performance. The dependent variable is Tobin’s q (Q), which represents the firm performance. Then, the authors regress the Tobin’s q next quarters (Qt + k) on the AFI current quarter (AFIt). The authors use a two-step generalized method of moments (GMM) and check endogeneity with the D-GMM model for the regression.

The results show that the current AFI is positively correlated with the firm performance in each of the next four quarters (the following one year). This positive relationship is pronounced for large firms, firms with no large foreign investors, liquid firms and firms listed in the active market. The results suggest that foreign investment might choose well-productive firms already. Also, the current AFI is significantly positively correlated with stock returns in each of the next three quarters. These results suggest that the AFI is informative up to one-year period.

The results suggest that foreign investors (most of them are small) in the Vietnamese market might choose well-productive firms already. However, if the large investors have long-term investment in tangible, intangible, human capital and so on, and lead to a significant increase in firms’ performance is still the limitation of this paper.

The results of this paper may guide investors whose portfolios are composed of stocks with foreign investment.

This paper adds to the literature to enrich the conclusion of a positive relationship between foreign ownership and firm performance.

Firms can choose from an array of approaches for reducing the detrimental financial effects caused by unfavorable fluctuations in commodity prices. The purpose of this paper is to provide guidance for effectively estimating the financial effects of mitigating commodity price risk volatility (CPV) in supply chain management decisions.

This paper adopts two prominent and complementary methodologies, namely, total cost of ownership (TCO and real options valuation (ROV), to illustrate how commodity price risk mitigation strategies can be analyzed with respect to their effect on costs and performance. The paper provides insights through a case study to demonstrate the application of these methods together and establish the benefits and challenges associated with their implementation.

The paper illustrates advantages and disadvantages of TCO and ROV and how these approaches can be adopted together to contribute to effective purchasing decisions. Supply chain flexibility is a key capability but requires investments. Holistically measuring the financial effects of flexibility investments is imperative for gaining executive management support in mitigating commodity price volatility.

This study can provide supply chain professionals with useful guidance for measuring the costs and benefits related to developing strategies for mitigating commodity price volatility. TCO provides a focus on the costs associated with the commodity purchasing process, and ROV enables the aggregation of all the costs and benefits associated with the use of the strategy and synthesizes them into the net value estimate.

The paper provides a comparison of different but complementary approaches, specifically TCO and ROV, for analyzing the effectiveness of CPV risk mitigation decisions. In addition, these two methods allow supply chain professionals to evaluate and control the financial effects of CPV risk, particularly the impact of mitigation on firm’s cash flows.