Suchergebnisse

Economists have had little success in explaining the rarity of worker-controlled firms. This book provides case studies of such firms and surveys the available evidence on their design and behavior. It outlines a policy proposal to encourage employee buyouts of conventional firms

AbstractMore than 30 years ago, I engaged in a debate with Oliver Williamson over the theoretical structure of transaction cost economics (TCE). This debate had its origins in our conflicting views of the labor-managed firm (LMF). Williamson believed that such firms were rare due to their inefficiency while I believed they might be rare due to market failures. Here I clarify my criticisms of TCE and contrast Williamson's view of the LMF with my own approach. I discuss empirical evidence that can distinguish between these two approaches and take up Williamson's challenge to identify policy interventions that could yield net social gains.

ABSTRACTThe 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.

"The proximate cause for Greg's interest in prehistory involved his effort to design a course on comparative economic institutions at Simon Fraser University during the late 1990s. This course was aimed at second and third year students who had seen some basic economics but had no math background beyond high school algebra. The goal was to use case studies of small-scale communities or societies to illustrate how economic reasoning can help to explain social behavior. A core element of this course was (and still remains) Johnson and Earle's book The Evolution of Human Societies (2000), which includes 19 case studies of anthropologically observed societies, ranging from mobile foraging bands to densely populated agrarian states. Greg's earliest attempts to model the emergence of agriculture and inequality began as lecture notes for this course."

Hereditary economic inequality is unknown among mobile foragers, but hereditary class distinctions between elites and commoners exist in some sedentary foraging societies. With agriculture, such stratification tends to become more pronounced. We develop a model to explain the associations among productivity, population, property rights, and inequality. Using Malthusian dynamics, we show that regional productivity growth leads to enclosure of the best sites first, creating inequality between insiders and outsiders. Hereditary elite and commoner classes subsequently arise at the best sites. Food consumption becomes more unequal and commoners become poorer. These predictions are consistent with a wide range of archaeological evidence. Adapted from the source document.