We develop a financial-contracting theory of the cooperative firm where production requires three generic tasks: working, managing, and monitoring. Workers provide an intermediate input (or labor directly); managers convert the workers' input into a final output; and directors monitor managers....

The idea that profit sharing increases employment has been widely tested, but the theoretical basis for the claim is weak and the empirical results are ambiguous. This paper shows that employee stock ownership based on individually-held stakes avoids the problems of traditional profit sharing....

Thanks to algorithmic management, the digital platform sector does not require sophisticated governance structures and labour intensity tends to be higher than in traditional sectors. So, why aren’t usually digital labour platforms worker cooperatives? We develop a simple model to study...

The purpose of this paper is to go back to the first principles of democracy and private property, and to show that they are violated by the conventional firms based on the employment relations and are satisfied by the legal form of a worker cooperative. The conventional bundle of rights in a...

This paper describes an organizational model that is intended to increase the proportion of cooperatives in the economy.This organizational model is of large cooperative companies that are networks of small cooperative self-governing teams, where these teams are legally independent companies but...

This paper describes an organizational model that is intended to increase the proportion of co-operatives in the economy. This organizational model is of large co-operative companies that are networks of small co-operative self-governing teams, where these teams are legally independent companies...

There is a fault line running through classical liberalism as to whether or not democratic self-governance is a necessary part of a liberal social order. The democratic and non-democratic strains of classical liberalism are both present today — particularly in America. Many contemporary...

In her introduction to this collection, Guinevere Nell applauds Austrian scholars for their noteworthy contributions to economics. However, in her view, contemporary Austrians are too often motivated — and constrained — by the search for free-market conclusions, leading them to neglect both...