TY - JOUR AU - Buchele, Robert AU - Kruse, Douglas AU - Rodgers, Loren AU - Scharf, Adria TI - Show Me the Money: Does Shared Capitalism Share the Wealth? JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 14830 PY - 2009 Y2 - April 2009 DO - 10.3386/w14830 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14830 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14830.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Robert Buchele Department of Economics Smith College 10 Prospect St., #103 Northampton, MA 01063 E-Mail: rbuchele@email.smith.edu Douglas L. Kruse School of Management and Labor Relations Rutgers University 94 Rockafeller Road Piscataway, NJ 08854 Tel: 732/445-5991 Fax: 732/445-2830 E-Mail: kruse@smlr.rutgers.edu Loren Rodgers National Center for Employee Ownership 1736 Franklin Street 8th Floor Oakland CA 94612 Tel: 510-208-1307 Fax: 510-272-9510 E-Mail: lrodgers@nceo.org Adria Scharf Ownership Associates 122 Mt. Auburn Street Cambridge, MA 02138 E-Mail: scharf@rpec.org M1 - published as Robert Buchele, Douglas L. Kruse, Loren Rodgers, Adria Scharf. "Show Me the Money: Does Shared Capitalism Share the Wealth?," in Douglas L. Kruse, Richard B. Freeman and Joseph R. Blasi, editors, "Shared Capitalism at Work: Employee Ownership, Profit and Gain Sharing, and Broad-based Stock Options " University of Chicago Press (2010) M3 - presented at "Shared Capitalism Conference", October 6-7, 2006 AB - This paper examines the effect of a variety of employee ownership programs on employees' holdings of their employers' stock, their earnings and their wealth. Two major datasets are employed: the NBER Shared Capitalism Research Project employee survey dataset and the 2002 and 2006 national General Social Surveys (GSS). The GSS national survey shows that 29% of permanent, full-time employees with at least one year on the job own their employers' stock, compared to the unsurprisingly higher 87% of employees in the NBER "shared capitalist" firms. The employees in the national sample hold an average of $10,600 of employer stock, compared to $52,800 in the NBER sample. Employee owners in NBER companies with broad-based ownership structures fare better: those in majority-owned ESOPs hold on average $86,000 in company stock and those in broad-based stock option plans hold options worth an average of $283,000. We find no evidence -- either between datasets or between employee-owners and non-owners within datasets -- of substitution of company stock ownership for pay or benefits. Moreover, our analysis suggests that company stock ownership substantially raises total employee wealth, though it appears to have little effect on the overall distribution of wealth. These results suggest that employee ownership tends to raise both ownership stakes and economic resources of American workers across the economic spectrum. ER -