“On the Entry of Employee-Owned Firms: Theory and Evidence from U.S. Manufacturing Industries, 1870–1960,” co-authored by Derek Jones, the Irma M. and Robert D. Morris Professor of Economics, appears as the lead article in volume 16 of Advances in the Economic Analysis of Participatory & Labor-Managed Firms.
In the article, Jones and co-author Michael Conte outlined an economic theory of choice of organizational form, with emphasis on explaining the selection of contractual relations within employee-owned firms.
They tested the theory on data for a group of U.S. producer cooperatives and found that this organizational form is “rather strongly responsive to variations in economic conditions.” They also found that support organizations have more positive impact on the formation rate of new cooperatives than do political motivations or legal institutions, such as cooperative incorporation laws.
Advances in the Economic Analysis of Participatory & Labor-Managed Firms is an edited annual volume of original international research focused on participatory and labor-managed organizations.
