Search results

Empirical evidence suggests that labour-managed firms (LMFs) are relatively rare in market economies not because they are unable to survive as long as their capitalist firm (CF) counterparts, but rather because they are created much less frequently. In this chapter we use event count models applied to panel data on UK manufacturing to provide a direct comparison of the entry process of CFs and LMFs. Our main finding is that risk and capital requirements constitute greater entry barriers for LMFs than for CFs.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss diverse matters concerning the field of Participation and Employee Ownership (PEO) coinciding with the launch of the JPEO.

This paper used mixed methods including bibliometric analysis.

Significant gaps exist in our knowledge of the scope and nature of PEO. Citation counts illustrate both the changing composition of research within PEO and faster relative growth than terms used to describe related fields such as labor unions and trade unions. Based on manually collected citation data I identify the most highly cited studies within PEO. Few of these studies attain a “home-run” citation count. However, PEO scholars are cited 19 percent more than economists in top 30 schools and the median C5 (total citations for the author’s five most highly cited papers) is more than 260 percent of the median for economists in “top 30” institutions. There is also some weak evidence that the citation bias in economics against female scholars is not as marked in PEO as elsewhere. A qualitative assessment of PEO studies suggests markedly uneven progress in empirical work across types of PEO.

No similar review has been done before.

This article examines the behaviour of a labour‐managed firm operating in a world in which the output price is uncertain, but it varies betwen a price floor and a price ceiling. We show that risk aversion is sufficient to give the direct relationship between a change in uncertainty and the optimal level of output for the labour‐managed firm, which is weaker than the decreasing absolute risk aversion assumption imposed by Hawawini and Michel (1979), Hey and Suckling (1980), Hey (1981a) and Paroush and Kahana (1980).

Five years ago in a review of Jaroslav Vanek's The Labour‐Managed Economy published in this journal, the present writer ventured, inter alia, two general observations on the economics literature of the labour‐managed firm. First, “Vanek has contributed more words and analysis on this subject than the rest of the economics profession put together”. Secondly, “In spite of the increasing concern shown by the ‘men of deeds’ with participation, income sharing and producers' cooperatives over the last ten years the majority of the ‘men of words’ who have offered any advice have been of the sociological species… This reviewer is optimistic enough to hope that this is not because economists have nothing to contribute”. A review of three new books on the subject provides a timely opportunity to reassess these observations.

This paper will discuss two problems that have plagued the literature on the Ward-Domar-Vanek labor-managed firm (LMF) model, the perverse supply response problem and the horizon problem. The paper also discusses the solution to the horizon problem and the alleged “solution” of a membership market.

This is a conceptual paper so it analyzes the two problems and shows how they can be resolved. It also shows how one alleged “solution” (membership market) is based on several conceptual mistakes about the structure of rights in a democratic firm.

The perverse supply response is based on the assumption that the members of a democratic firm can expel for no cause some members when it would benefit the remaining members. It is shown that the same perverse behavior happens conceptually and historically in a conventional firm under the same assumptions. The horizon problem is resolved by the system of internal capital accounts (ICAs) that has been independently invented at least four times.

The idea of a democratic firm is quite often dismissed by conventional economists: “At first it seems like a good idea but unfortunately it is plagued by structural problems such as the perverse supply response and the horizon problem.” Hence it is important to see that the first is not a problem under ordinary assumptions and that the second is a solved problem.

The perverse supply response problem can be reproduced in a conventional firm under similar assumptions, and the horizon problem is real problem for social or common ownership firms but is solved in the Mondragon-type worker cooperatives by the system of ICAs. This has been known and published since the early 1980s, but conventional economists ignore the solution and still cite it as an inherent structure problem of a democratic firm.

It has not been previously shown in the LMF literature that the perverse supply response can be reproduced in a conventional corporation under similar assumptions since the maximand for the conventional firm is not total market value but that value per current shareholder. The solution to the horizon problem using ICAs has long been “known” but never acknowledged in the conventional literature as if it was a necessary feature of workplace democracy. The idea of a membership market is analyzed and criticized.

This essay is a tribute to Jaroslav Vanek who spent 32 years at Cornell University where he founded the Program on Participation and Labor-Managed Systems (PPLMS) in 1970, which became the home for economic research on these issues in the US. It is a brief intellectual history of a multi-dimensional scholar.

Vanek's seminal work in the American Economic Review in 1969 marked the culmination of a decade of work on labor management inspired by his brother Jan's work on Yugoslavia, considered then to be a worker-managed economic system. In two rapidly following tomes, Vanek laid out the landscape for the development of a new subfield in economics by providing precursors to many of the results to follow. In that previous decade, Vanek produced papers in traditional economic theory, e.g. international trade and economic growth.

Vanek's mindset persists in the interplay between the emerging theory of labor-managed firms and traditional economic literature that takes seriously the role of organizational form. This essay develops that cross-pollination and seeks to identify the remaining questions and issues for future work that the economics profession owes to Jaroslav Vanek.

Connection of strands of literature in the economic theory with the literature on labor-managed firms and worker-managed economies tracing the evolution of the latter to the work of Jaroslav Vanek.

The literature on labor-managed firms identifies the source of under-capitalization in the Furubotn–Pejovich effect. Appropriable capital accounts can counteract the horizon problem, but they engender little-examined problems connected with the distribution, reinvestment, and reimbursement of net surpluses. This paper proposes that the introduction of cooperative bonds would provide a better match between the horizons of members and their firms. However, bonds generate risks of their own due to capital variability, thus requiring the imposition of various constraints and the retention of appropriate levels of collective reserves. Finally, a hierarchy of liabilities is proposed to protect parties who undergo information disadvantages.

The main aim of this paper is to provide an assessment of the intellectual impact of the work of Jaroslav Vanek in the related fields of participation and labor management (hereafter, PLM) and participation and employee ownership (hereafter, PEO).

This paper used mixed methods including bibliometric analysis.

Vanek's work, particularly the General Theory of Labor-Managed Market Economies, (Vanek, 1970) is the building block for the modern scientific study of cooperatives and for helping to establish the fields of PLM and PEO. Vanek (1970) continues to be the highest cited publication each year that investigates the pure case of a labor-managed firm. Arguably his work has played a significant role is setting the stage for the development of adjacent fields in economics such as the new institutional economics. For an economist, his work has had an unusually strong impact on work outside of economics.

No similar assessment has been undertaken before.

There is now a considerable literature on the Illyrian firm (that is, the firm which is assumed to maximise income per worker), and it has been argued that the analysis may have relevance for the labour‐managed or co‐operative enterprise. Significant contributions to this literature have been made by Domar (1966), Vanek (1970), Meade (1972, 1974) and others but the seminal paper is generally recognised to be that of Ward (1958).

The purpose of this article is to summarize the relationship between the research of Jaroslav Vanek on labor-managed firms (LMFs) and the research of Gregory K. Dow on the same topic.

The article reviews the research of Jaroslav Vanek in the 1970s and explains how this influenced the publications of Gregory K. Dow extending from the 1980s to the present. A particular focus involves Dow's book “The Labor-Managed Firm: Theoretical Foundations” published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. The methodology is to present an intellectual history in narrative form. The scope of the paper is the economic theory of the LMF.

The article finds that Dow's interest in LMFs was stimulated by Vanek's publications from the early 1970s. However, Dow's publications in the 1980s were motivated to a large degree by efforts to overcome the limitations of Vanek's theory of the LMF, a goal that shaped much of Dow's later research in the field.

The paper illuminates the strong intellectual influence Jaroslav Vanek exerted on the economic theory of the LMF. Readers who want information about the influences on Dow's work may also find it useful.