This book uses economic theory to argue that worker-controlled firms are rare due to market failures rather than inherent organizational defects. The book will be of interest to scholarly researchers, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates in economics, especially in industrial organization, labor economics, comparative economics, organizational economics, and finance.

In previous work, Gregory K. Dow created a broad and accessible overview of worker-controlled firms. In his new book, The Labor-Managed Firm: Theoretical Foundations, Dow provides the formal models that underpinned his earlier work, while developing promising new directions for economic research. Emphasizing that capital is alienable while labor is inalienable, Dow shows how this distinction, together with market imperfections, explains the rarity of labor-managed firms. This book uses modern microeconomics, exploits up-to-date empirical research, and constructs a unified theory that accounts for many facts about the behavior, performance, and design of labor-managed firms. With a large number of entirely new chapters, comprehensive updating of earlier material, a critique of the literature, and policy recommendations, here Dow presents the capstone work of his career, encompassing more than three decades of theoretical research.

Monograph comprising an evaluation of workers self management experiences in Peru and Yugoslavia - discusses the solutions to macroeconomics problems such as unequal income distribution, decision making on capital investment, and labour productivity within self-managed firms, etc., and considers micro and macro economic theory relating to efficiency and competition. Graphs and references.

Monograph presenting an economic theory in support of a new economic system based on workers' self-management (workers participation) - covers the equilibrium of a competitive enterprise and changing market conditions, the decentralization of decision making, labour supply functions, economic policy problems, 'income sharing' (wages) and wage incentive, the allocation of economic resources, legal aspects and basic institutional forms of the labour-managed economy, etc. Diagrams and references.

The economic theory of the labor-managed firm dates back 60 years. Here I review the intellectual history of this field, with critical remarks and proposals for future development. The decades of the 1960s-1980s saw a burst of theoretical speculation that generally did not hold up well under empirical scrutiny. By the 1990s, progress on the mainstream theory of the firm was overtaking some of this early research. At the same time, a growing body of econometric work on labor-managed firms was providing new stylized facts for theorists to explain. While the earlier period was characterized by an excess supply of theories relative to facts, more recently the balance has begun to tip in the opposite direction. I close by suggesting new theoretical directions that might shed light on the empirical asymmetries between capital-managed and labor-managed firms.

Discusses the theory of labour-managed firms or producers' cooperatives, and of economies companies principally of such firms.

The historical relationship between capital and labor has evolved 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.