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

Between one-third and one-half of employees participate directly in company performance through profit sharing, gainsharing, employee ownership, or stock options. This flies in the face of concerns about the free rider problem and worker risk aversion in group incentives, and raises many questions about the effects on firms and workers. This paper lays out the major reasons we may see such "shared capitalism" plans, and reviews recent nationally representative surveys on the prevalence of these plans. We also introduce the NBER shared capitalism data, based on questions added to the 2002 and 2006 General Social Surveys (GSS) and more than 40,000 employee surveys from 14 companies with different combinations of shared capitalism plans. We find that while shared capitalism exists broadly throughout the economy, it is more likely in larger establishments. The free rider effect may be countered by the use of other policies to create productive teamwork and a cooperative culture: shared capitalism is positively linked to workplace decision-making, training, job security, teamwork, the ability to easily observe co-worker performance, and low levels of supervision. Also, more risk-averse employees avoid participating in several types of shared capitalism, but two-thirds of even the most risk-averse employees in these companies say they want shared capitalism as part of their pay package. The effects of these plans for both workers and firms are more fully explored in accompanying papers.

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Shared Capitalism in the U.S. Economy? Prevalence, Characteristics, and Employee Views of Financial Participation in Enterprises

Employee Ownership: Revolution or Ripoff?

Kremlin capitalism : the privatization of the Russian economy

In June 1996, for the first time in thousand years, Russian citizens were given the chance to select their head of state in a democratic election. Michael McFaul analyzes three major factors that combine to explain why Boris Yeltsin's victory, should have been expected, discusses the reasons behind Yeltsin's victory, and examines its impact on electoral politics in post-Soviet Russia.

Bringing the Russian State Back in: Explanations of the Derailed Transition to Market Democracy@@@Kremlin Capitalism: Privatizing the Russian Economy@@@Democracy from Scratch@@@Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation@@@Russia's 1996 Presidential Election: The End of Polarized Politics

Group incentive systems have to overcome the free rider or 1/N problem, which gives workers an incentive to shirk, if they are to succeed. This paper uses new questions on responses to shirking from the General Social Survey and a special NBER survey of workers at over 300 worksites in 14 companies that have some form of group incentive pay to examine how well workers can monitor their peers and what they do when the peers are not working up to speed. The paper finds that: 1) most workers say that they can detect fellow employees who shirk; 2) many report that they would speak to the shirker or report the behavior or a supervisor, and many report that they did so in the past; 3) the proportion that takes action against shirkers is greatest among workers paid under group incentive systems, in smaller companies, and in companies with good employee-management relations; 4) group incentives interact with high-performance human resource policies such as employee involvement teams, training, task variety, low levels of supervision, and good fixed wages to induce more workers to act against shirking; 5) workers in workplaces where there is more anti-shirking behavior report that co-workers work harder, encourage other workers more, and report that their workplace facility is more effective in ways that should raise productivity and profits.

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Joseph R. Blasi

Papers

Shared Capitalism in the U.S. Economy? Prevalence, Characteristics, and Employee Views of Financial Participation in Enterprises

Employee Ownership: Revolution or Ripoff?

Kremlin capitalism : the privatization of the Russian economy

Bringing the Russian State Back in: Explanations of the Derailed Transition to Market Democracy@@@Kremlin Capitalism: Privatizing the Russian Economy@@@Democracy from Scratch@@@Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation@@@Russia's 1996 Presidential Election: The End of Polarized Politics

Worker responses to shirking under shared capitalism