GOVERNMENT SUPPORT FOR PROFIT SHARING, GAINSHARING, ESOPs, AND TQM

Empirical evidence suggests that profit sharing, gainsharing, employee ownership, worker participation, and Total Quality Management (TQM) may increase productivity and firm performance. Nevertheless, one needs to ground the case for government intervention in support of each of these programs on arguments concerning externalities or merit goods. This paper argues that no one yet has offered a convincing case of this nature. It also discusses the U.S. government's support for ESOPs and suggests reasons for its disappointing results in the hope that future policy experiments will not repeat these mistakes.     

PRECAUTIONARY DEMAND FOR LABOUR AND FIRM SIZE

This paper studies firms' job creation decisions in a labour market with search frictions. A simple labour market search model is developed in which a firm can search for a second employee while producing with a first worker, and this creates the equilibrium size distribution of firms. A firm expands employment even if the instantaneous payoff to a large firm is less than that of staying small – a firm has a precautionary motive to expand its size. In addition, this motive is enhanced by a greater market tightness. Because of this effect, firms’ decisions become interdependent – a firm creates a vacancy if it expects other firms to do the same, creating strategic complementarity among firms and thereby self‐fulfilling multiple equilibria. An increase in productivity can cause a qualitative change in labour market tightness and the rate of unemployment.     

Technology choice,relative performance pay,and worker heterogeneity

We identify a new problem that may arise when heterogeneous workers are motivated by relative performance pay: if workers’ abilities and the production technology are complements, the firm may prefer not to adopt a more advanced technology even though this technology would costlessly increase each worker’s productivity. Due to the complementarity between ability and technology, under technology adoption the productivity of a more able worker increases more strongly than the productivity of a less able colleague. As a consequence, both workers’ motivation to exert effort is reduced. We show that this adverse incentive effect is dominant and, consequently, keeps the firm from introducing a better production technology if talent uncertainty is sufficiently high and/or monitoring of workers is sufficiently precise.     

Firm ownership and internal labour practices in a transition economy

One feature common to many post‐socialist transition economies is a relatively compressed wage structure in the state‐owned sector. We conjecture that this compressed wage structure creates weak incentives for work effort and worker skill acquisition and thus presents adverse consequences for the entire transition economy if a substantial portion of the labour force works in the state sector. We explore firm wage incentives and worker training, as well as other labour practices and outcomes, in a transition setting with matched firm and worker data collected in one of the largest provinces of Vietnam – Ho Chi Minh City. The Vietnamese state sector exhibits a compressed wage distribution in relation to privately owned firms with foreign ownership. State wage practices stress tenure over worker productivity and their wage policies result in flatter wage–experience profiles and lower returns to education. The state work force is in greater need of formal training, a need that is in part met through direct government financing. In spite of the opportunities for government financed training and at least partly due to inefficient worker incentives, state firms, by certain measures, exhibit lower levels of labour productivity. The private sector comparison group to state firms for all of these findings is foreign owned firms. The internal labour practices of foreign firms are more consistent with a view of profit‐maximizing firms operating with no political constraints. This is not the case for Vietnamese de novo private firms that exhibit much more idiosyncratic behaviour and whose labour practices are often indistinguishable from state firms. The exact reasons for this remain a topic of on‐going research yet we conjecture that various private sector constraints, including limited access to formal capital, play an important role.     

The productivity effects of worker participation: Producer cooperatives in western economies

The paper presents econometric estimates of productivity effects of various forms of worker participation in Western producer cooperatives. While the effects vary across institutional settings, the overall effect is found to be positive. The positive effects are found most uniformly with respect to profit sharing and, to a slightly lesser extent, individual capital (share) ownership and participation in decision-making by workers. The size of individual worker loans to the coop is unrelated to productivity, while collective capital ownership exhibits an insignificant or a negative productivity effect.     

Profit Sharing and Outsourcing under Labor Market Imperfection

When the wage rate is set by the labor union, profit sharing and outsourcing is combined in this paper to analyze how the implementation of profit sharing affects individual effort and wage and thus outsourcing. The findings show that profit sharing and wage have an individual effort‐augmenting effect and therefore increase productivity. It is also found that the wage effect of profit sharing in general is ambiguous. There is a wage decreasing substitution effect, but in contrast, there is a wage increasing effect via labor demand elasticity and effort so that outsourcing and employment effects are also ambiguous. Furthermore, it is shown under which condition a firm will implement a profit sharing scheme.     

企业出口与生产率的关系——基于中国工业企业数据的实证研究

采用1998—2007年中国工业企业数据,对出口与生产率的关系进行了再探讨,具体研究了出口企业是否具有更高的生产率、企业在做出口决策的过程中是否存在自我选择机制以及出口行为本身是否能促进企业生产率的增长。研究结果显示:当用TFP衡量生产率时,企业出口决策中存在自我选择机制,因此出口企业的生产率相对较高——这与异质企业贸易模型的预期结果一致;当用劳动生产率(人均附加值)衡量企业生产率时,则"生产率悖论"存在,即出口者的生产率反而较低;当企业刚进入出口市场时,其生产率会经历短期的快速增长,但从长期来看,出口对企业生产率增长的作用在整体上是负向的。     

Optimal ownership in joint ventures with contributions of asymmetric partners

This paper addresses two questions concerning Joint Venture (JV) agreements. We first study the formation and the performance of a JV when the partners’ contribution has a different impact on the JV profits. Then, we check whether the JV is more likely as well as the welfare level improves when the decision on JV profit sharing among partners is delegated to an independent JV management (Management sharing) rather than jointly taken by partners (Coordinated sharing). We find that the firm whose effort has a higher impact on the JV’s profits should have a larger profit share. Moreover, at least in some cases, Management sharing increases both welfare and the probability that the JV is formed.      

Endogenous information quality: A job-assignment application

This paper investigates the optimal acquisition of information in a model of job assignment within a firm. We consider a firm with two types of jobs, skilled and unskilled. The firm draws workers randomly from the general population, and a worker is either talented or untalented. Initially, a worker's productivity in the firm is unknown to the worker and the firm. Workers are equally productive in the unskilled job, but talented workers are more productive in the skilled job than in the unskilled job, and untalented workers are more productive in the unskilled job than in the skilled job. Before assigning a worker to a job, the firm can test whether the employee is talented, and the firm is able to choose the accuracy of this test. We assume that the cost of a test is increasing and convex in test accuracy. We show that (1) the accuracy of the firm's test increases with the cost of a mismatched worker; (2) increased optimism about the worker's ability need not lead to less rigorous testing; (3) the probability that a worker is assigned to the skilled job need not increase as the gain from assigning a talented worker to a skilled job increases, or the loss from assigning an untalented worker to a skilled job decreases, or the fraction of the population that is skilled increases; and (4) a longer testing period, allowing as many as two tests of workers, leads the firm to use a less expensive, and less accurate, test initially than when there is only one opportunity to gather information.     

Optimal Contracts When a Worker Envies His Boss

A worker's utility may increase with his income, but envy canmake his utility decline with his employer's income. This articleuses a principal-agent model to study profit-maximizing contractswhen a worker envies his employer. Envy tightens the worker'sparticipation constraint and so calls for higher pay and/ora softer effort requirement. Moreover, a firm with an enviousworker can benefit from profit sharing, even when the worker'seffort is fully contractible. We discuss several applicationsof our theoretical work: envy can explain why a lower-levelworker is awarded stock options, why incentive pay is lowerin nonprofit organizations, and how governmental productionof a good can be cheaper than private production.     

Productivity,earnings, and profit sharing — An econometric analysis of alternative models

The theoretical status of the relationship between productivity, wages, and profit sharing (PS) is poor. Only some alternative hypotheses can be formulated. From these explanations six different econometric models are derived. Using data of the German Socio-Economic Panel the models are estimated and tests and indicators are employed to choose the best model. Our investigation speaks in favour of hybrid simultaneous Tobit models where the level of profit sharing is positively correlated with productivity which induces positive wage effects on the one hand. But on the other hand the level of wages is also relevant to the question whether a firm introduces or decides to continuePS and which amount ofPS should be paid.What is obvious is not always true and introspection is a notoriously unreliable guide to empirical magnitudes. Blinder (1990, p.2)     

INVENTOR PRODUCTIVITY AND FIRM SIZE: EVIDENCE FROM PANEL DATA ON INVENTORS

It has long been recognized that worker wages and productivity are higher in large firms. Moreover, economists have been interested in the efficiency of large firms in R&D enterprises. This paper uses inventor panel data to examine the relationship between inventor productivity and firm size in the pharmaceutical and semiconductor industries. In both industries, we find that inventors' productivity increases with firm size even after controlling for inventors' experience, education and other firm characteristics. We find evidence in the pharmaceutical industry that this is partly accounted for by differences in the way in which large and small firms organize R&D activities.     

POSITIVE SELF‐IMAGE IN TOURNAMENTS*

This article analyzes the implications of worker overestimation of productivity for firms in which incentives take the form of tournaments. Each worker overestimates his productivity but is aware of the bias in his opponent's self‐assessment. The manager of the firm, on the other hand, correctly assesses workers' productivities and self‐beliefs when setting tournament prizes. The article shows that, under a variety of circumstances, firms can benefit from worker positive self‐image. The article also shows that worker positive self‐image can improve welfare in tournaments. In contrast, workers' utility declines due to their own misguided choices.     

Relationship between city size and firm productivity – A new interpretation using the Chinese experience

This paper contributes to the literature on the relationship between city size and firm productivity by focusing on agglomeration, selection (market competition), and sorting (presence of firms with diverse productivity) effects using Chinese firm-level data for 1998–2013. Contrary to the existing literature, our parametric regression estimates from nearly two million firms show that when the selection effect is controlled, productivity advantage in big cities is reversed. This outcome is explained through a quantile regression showing the existence of left-sided sorting (inefficient firms sort themselves to larger cities) in big cities which is not captured in existing empirical literature. We further find that (1) left-sided sorting is stronger in exporters than non-exporters; (2) is also generated mainly in enterprises with high asset-liability ratios; and (3) selection has a positive effect on firm productivity, suggesting that market competition is key in an explanation of the rapid growth of big cities in China.     

Flexible and Committed Profit Sharing with Wage Bargaining: Implications for Equilibrium Unemployment

We analyze the relationship between profit sharing, employee effort, wage formation and unemployment under different relative timings of the wage and profit sharing decisions. The optimal profit share under commitment exceeds that under flexibility, because through a profit share commitment the firm can induce wage moderation. The negotiated profit sharing depends positively on the bargaining power of trade union and it has both effort-enhancing and wage-moderating effects. Higher profit sharing is shown to reduce equilibrium unemployment under ``sufficiently rigid' labor market institutions, but it can harm employment when labor market ``rigidities' are ``small enough'.     

对几种典型企业组织的规模差异评析

基于从本质到现象的分析路线,我们可以更清楚地认识企业规模：社会合理规模与企业的有效性相对应,取决于企业的组织成本和协调收益;而企业的现实规模则与特定个体的效率相对应,效率不仅取决于协调收益也与转移收益有关。一般地,企业的决策权为不同人所掌握,就会产生不同的收益转移效应,从而产生了多姿多彩的企业形态：（1）不同社会文化伦理中的收益转移效应差异会影响企业规模。一般地,社会信任度越高,企业规模就越合理;而信任度不高的那些社会中,企业规模往往走向两个极端。（2）不同的分配制度中的收益转移效应差异也会影响企业规模。利润分享制企业的剩余索取权往往为所有员工所分享,从而其规模往往小于泰勒制企业。（3）在工人自治型企业中,由于工人主导了剩余索取权的分配,从而使得企业的规模相对较小。（4）中央计划体制下国有企业是极端化的经理管理型企业,经理们所追求的社会收益与企业规模联系在一起,因而这类企业的规模较大。     

PROFIT SHARING AND EMPLOYEE OWNERSHIP: POLICY IMPLICATIONS

Various arguments extol public encouragement of profit sharing and Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs). Generally, advocates of public intervention cite externalities (market failure), provision of merit goods, or social transformation as bases for their arguments. To the extent that profit sharing and ESOPs increase productivity or reduce employer costs, no case exists for public intervention, since such advantages are internalized. Although Congress views retirement saving as a merit good, deferred profit sharing and ESOPs are no more deserving of public subsidy on that basis than are other forms of saving, such as pensions. Finally, the notion that ESOPs promote a social transformation by redistributing equity is untenable. One can make a case for government efforts to spread data and information about these plans. The potential macro stabilizing effects of profit sharing—but not ESOPs—provide a rationale for a tax subsidy to the former.     

Starting Wages Respond to Employer's Risk

Firms hiring new graduates face uncertainty on the future productivity of workers. Theory suggests that starting wages reflect this, with lower pay for greater uncertainty. We use the dispersion of exam grades within a field of education as an indicator of the unobserved heterogeneity that employers face. We find solid evidence that starting wages are lower if the variance of exam grades is higher and higher if the skew is higher: employers shift the cost of productivity risk to new hires, but pay for the opportunity to catch a really good worker. Estimating the extent of risk cost sharing between firm and worker shows that shifting to workers is larger in the market sector than in the public sector and diminishes with experience.     

How to measure competition in an economy in transition

This paper attempts to find a robust method of measuring competition when firms' operational activities are subject to frictions. The first part theoretically tests the indicative quality of two competition measures, the price‐cost margin (PCM) and the profit elasticity, in a model of monopolistic competition. The second part studies the empirical performance of the indices for a panel of Ukrainian manufacturing firms. This study offers a new approach to measuring profit elasticity that relies on structural estimation of a production function. The estimation methodology retrieves a productivity index that is adjusted to imperfect competition. The proposed method of measuring profit elasticity is found to be robust to frictions, but the PCM and traditional profit elasticity are biased, especially when the intensity of competition is low. Empirical findings show that competition exhibits a significantly positive correlation with aggregate productivity performance, while its impact on firm productivity is nonlinear.     

Intellectual property rights,product complexity and the organization of multinational firms

This paper studies how the intellectual property right (IPR) regime in destination countries influences the decision of firms between procurement from related parties and from independent suppliers while the latter may involve technology sharing or not. Using firm‐level data on the mode choice for each transaction and a new product complexity measure, results confirm that firms are generally reluctant to source complex goods from outside firm boundaries. However, when technology is shared, IPRs promote outsourcing of more complex goods whereas without technology sharing, IPRs promote outsourcing of less complex products that are prone to reverse engineering and simpler to imitate.