Comparative productivity analysis between labour-managed firms and conventional capitalist companies in Spain

The comparative analysis of productivity of the cooperative and capitalist forms of organization has been performed in different countries using various methodologies.In Spain, the Mondragon industrial cooperatives have been studied in depth; however, empirical research comparing the two forms of organization is scarce. This paper represents an empirical contribution using a sample of Spanish manufacturing firms and demonstrates that the productivity of worker-owned firms (including cooperatives and sociedades laborales) is smaller than the productivity of capitalist firms. These findings are based on the estimation, by means generalized method of moments, of a Cobb-Douglas production function. The econometric model includes a dummy variable for measuring the effect of worker-owned form of organization on labor-productivity.