To Join or Not to Join? Factors Influencing Employee Share Plan Membership in a Multinational Corporation

Many firms encourage employees to own company stock through share plans that subsidize the price at favorable rates, but even so many employees do not buy shares. Using a new survey of employees in a multinational with a share ownership plan, we find considerable variation in joining among observationally equivalent workers and explore the reasons for the variation. Participation in the plan is higher the greater the potential pay-off from joining the share plan, which indicates that rational economic calculations affect the decision to join. But there is also evidence that psychological factors affect the decision to join. Some nonmembers say they intend to join in the future, which means they forgo the benefits of immediate membership. The proportion of workers who purchase shares varies across workplaces beyond what we predict from worker characteristics. This suggests that coworker behavior influences decisions. Indeed, workers say that they pay most attention to other workers and little attention to company HR management in their decision on joining.share plans, share contributions, risk aversion, peer effects, social norms

What Voice Do British Workers Want?

The problems/need for representation and participation reported by workers vary across workplaces and by types of jobs. Workers with greater workplace needs are more desirous of unions but their preferences are fine-grained. Workers want unions to negotiate wages and work conditions and for protection but do not see unions as helping them progress in their careers. Many workers see no major workplace problems that would impel them to form or join unions. Unionism raises reported problems while firm-based non-union channels of voice reduce reported problems, but unions that work effectively with management and those that have sufficient strength to be taken seriously by management reduce the number of problems at union workplaces.trades unions, worker voice, employment relations

How Does Shared Capitalism Affect Economic Performance in the UK?

This paper uses nationally representative linked workplace-employee data from the British 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey to examine the operation of shared capitalist forms of pay - profit-sharing and group pay for performance, employee share ownership, and stock options—and their link to productivity. It shows that shared capitalism has grown in the UK, as it has in the US; that different forms of shared capitalist pay complement each other and other labour practices in the sense that firms use them together more than they would if they chose modes of pay and work practices independently; and that workplaces switch among schemes frequently, which suggests that they have trouble optimizing and the transactions cost of switching are relatively low. Among the single schemes, share ownership has the clearest positive association with productivity, but its impact is largest when firms combine it with other forms of shared capitalist pay and modes of organization.share ownership, payment systems, labour productivity

Worker Needs and Voice in the US and the UK

Workers have responded differently to declining union density in the US and UK. US workers have unfilled demand for unions whereas many UK workers free-ride at unionized workplaces. To explain this difference, we create a scalar measure of worker needs for representation and relate desire for unionism to this measure and to the choices that the US and UK labor relations systems offer workers. Our measure of needs has similar properties across countries and is the single most important determinant of worker desire for unions and collective representation. Conditional on needs, we find that in both countries workers are more favourable to unions when management is positive toward unions, but also favor them when management strongly opposes unionism, compared to management having a neutral view. Much of the difference in the response of US and UK workers to declining unionism appears to be due to the different institutional arrangements for voice that the countries offer to workers.

Losing the World's Best and Brightest

Presents findings from a survey of Indian, Chinese, and European students at U.S. colleges and universities on their decisions to stay or return home after graduation and the factors behind the decisions, such as where they see the best opportunities

America's Loss Is the World's Gain: America's New Immigrant Entrepreneurs, Part IV

Analyzes survey data on highly educated Indian and Chinese workers and students who returned home from the United States -- their characteristics, motivations for coming to and leaving the U.S., professional success, and odds of returning to the U.S

Why do firms run all-employee stock purchase plans?

Alex Bryson, John Forth and Richard Freeman present research into the benefits of all-employee stock purchase plans. They find that employees who joined the plan were more committed to the firm, more satisfied with their jobs and behaved in ways which were productivity-enhancing, namely working longer hours and taking less sickness absence