One worker, one vote : does it make a difference ?

Esmeralda GERRITSE (UCLouvain, CIRTES)

Résumé

In this paper, we are interested in the relation between the type of governance of an enterprise and the income paid to workers. We focus on enterprises where workers are the owners of the firm comparing them to more conventional type of firms and study how this affects the wages of the lower end of the distribution of workers. Few recent studies have shown that newly created worker cooperatives pay higher wages with respect to conventional firms and that this pay gap is higher for low skilled workers. We pose the question on whether these redistributive policies also take place when workers from a conventional enterprise buy-out the firm and get voting rights. We study this question in the French context through a staggered difference-in-difference methodology.