“Equality Under Threat by the Talented: Evidence from Worker-Managed Firms”, 2016-01-12 ():
[cf. 1997] Does workplace democracy engender greater pay equality? Are high-ability individuals more likely to quit egalitarian organizational regimes? The article revisits this long-standing issue by analyzing the interplay between compensation structure and quit behavior in the distinct yet underexplored institutional setting of worker-managed firms.
The analysis is based on novel administrative data sources, which allow constructing a simple ordinal measure of the workers’ ability type.
The article’s key findings are that worker-managed firms have a more compressed compensation structure than conventional firms, and high-ability members are more likely than other members to exit.