This paper surveys research on corporate governance, with special attention to the importance of legal protection of investors and of ownership concentration in corporate governance systems around the world.

A Survey of Corporate Governance

This article surveys research on corporate governance, with special attention to the importance of legal protection of investors and of ownership concentration in corporate governance systems around the world. CORPORATE GOVERNANCE DEALS WITH the ways in which suppliers of finance to corporations assure themselves of getting a return on their investment. How do the suppliers of finance get managers to return some of the profits to them? How do they make sure that managers do not steal the capital they supply or invest it in bad projects? How do suppliers of finance control managers? At first glance, it is not entirely obvious why the suppliers of capital get anything back. After all, they part with their money, and have little to contribute to the enterprise afterward. The professional managers or entrepreneurs who run the firms might as well abscond with the money. Although they sometimes do, usually they do not. Most advanced market economies have solved the problem of corporate governance at least reasonably well, in that they have assured the flows of enormous amounts of capital to firms, and actual repatriation of profits to the providers of finance. But this does not imply that they have solved the corporate governance problem perfectly, or that the corporate governance mechanisms cannot be improved. In fact, the subject of corporate governance is of enormous practical impor

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Men and Women of the Corporation

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

Socioeconomic status (SES) underlies three major determinants of health: health care, environmental exposure, and health behavior. In addition, chronic stress associated with lower SES may also increase morbidity and mortality. Reducing SES disparities in health will require policy initiatives addressing the components of socioeconomic status (income, education, and occupation) as well as the pathways by which these affect health. Lessons for U.S. policy approaches are taken from the Acheson Commission in England, which was charged with reducing health disparities in that country.

Socioeconomic Disparities In Health: Pathways And Policies

Monitoring Colleagues at Work: Employee Ownership, Profit Sharing, Peer Pressure, and Workplace Performance in the United States

This paper examines how shared capitalism compensation systems - those that link employee pay to company performance - affect diverse employee outcomes. It uses two data sets: the national GSS survey that provides a broad representative view of the extent of the programs; and the NBER Shared Capitalism Project surveys of workers in 14 companies that use shared capitalism programs extensively. We find that greater involvement in the programs is generally linked to greater participation in decisions, higher quality supervision and treatment of employees, more training, higher pay and benefits, greater job security, and higher job satisfaction. We also find positive interactions of shared capitalism with high-performance policies in predicting participation in decisions and overall job satisfaction, and negative interactions of shared capitalism with close supervision in affecting almost all of the outcomes. Overall the results support the idea that workers can gain by sharing, but whether this happens is contingent on other workplace policies.

Do Workers Gain by Sharing? Employee Outcomes under Employee Ownership, Profit Sharing, and Broad-based Stock Options

Labor Practices and Outcomes across Countries

Our economy is struggling to find not merely the path that will lead it up from the bottom of the latest business cycle, but a new way forward to restore widespread prosperity that is broadly shared in an economic environment that features an unprecedented level of global competition. Improving conditions require an understanding of complex systems and a thoughtful analysis of the influence of the interactions of many factors. Ownership is one of the key factors. And, as the work presented at the symposium makes clear, needed innovation is not limited merely to innovation in products or production — not constrained only to better information technology or bio-technology — but expanded to innovation in ownership, organizational design, governance, and capital formation. The search for solutions raises complex, interrelated questions concerning the role of employees both in their companies (issues of motivation, participation, innovation, and productivity) and in the economy (issues of personal access to capital, opportunities for wealth and income generation, and a shared stake in prosperity). What, then, will emerge as the new means for accumulating and supplying capital, for organizing and managing people in business enterprises, and for sharing the resulting wealth and income in ways that meet societal needs? In the face of this daunting challenge, it is encouraging to see the considerable diversity in the research being conducted on the impact of broad-based employee ownership on this question.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1969094_code98887.pdf?abstractid=1969094&mirid=1

Open Systems: Applying Diverse Employee Ownership Theories to Address Today’s Complex Challenges

The historical relationship between capital and labor has changed radically in the past few decades. One particularly noteworthy development is the rise of shared capitalism, a system in which workers have become partial owners of their firms and thus, in effect, both employees and stockholders. Profit-sharing arrangements and gain-sharing bonuses, which tie compensation directly to a firm's performance, also reflect this new attitude toward labor. "Shared Capitalism at Work" analyzes the effects of this trend on workers and firms. The contributors focus on four main areas: the fraction of firms that participate in shared capitalism programs in the United States and abroad, the factors that enable these firms to overcome classic free rider and risk problems, the effect of shared capitalism on firm performance, and the impact of shared capitalism on worker well-being. This volume provides essential studies for understanding the increasingly important role of shared capitalism in the modern workplace.

Joseph R. Blasi

Papers

Monitoring Colleagues at Work: Employee Ownership, Profit Sharing, Peer Pressure, and Workplace Performance in the United States

Do Workers Gain by Sharing? Employee Outcomes under Employee Ownership, Profit Sharing, and Broad-based Stock Options

Labor Practices and Outcomes across Countries

Open Systems: Applying Diverse Employee Ownership Theories to Address Today’s Complex Challenges

Shared Capitalism at Work: Employee Ownership, Profit and Gain Sharing, and Broad-based Stock Options