How Does Shared Capitalism Affect Economic Performance in the UK?

Alex Bryson () and Richard B. Freeman ()

No 14235, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper uses nationally representative linked workplace-employee data from the British 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey to examine the operation of shared capitalist forms of pay--profit-sharing and group pay for performance, employee share ownership, and stock options--and their link to productivity. It shows that shared capitalism has grown in the UK, as it has in the US; that different forms of shared capitalist pay complement each other and other labor practices in the sense that firms use them together more than they would if they chose modes of pay and work practices independently; and that workplaces switch among schemes frequently, which suggests that they have trouble optimizing and the transactions cost of switching are relatively low. Among the single schemes, share ownership has the clearest positive association with productivity, but its impact is largest when firms combine it with other forms of shared capitalist pay and modes of organization.

JEL-codes: J33 L23 L25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-eff and nep-lab
Date: 2008-08
Note: LS
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14235.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

Related works:
Working Paper: How Does Shared Capitalism Affect Economic Performance in the UK? (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14235

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14235
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Address: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().