The Ownership of Enterprise

Just a quick plug for The Ownership of Enterprise if you're at all interested in patterns in company ownership. It's a very thorough study that looks at why different types of ownership arise in particular industries. As I blogged previously it comes at these issues from a dispassionate perspective, and he makes some interesting points about when employee ownership works and when it doesn't. Basically he argues that it only really works well where the employee-owners are fairly similar. So the theoretical advantages (like the fact that workers may have better information than external investors) don't necessarily matter that much. Also the section on the role of mutuals in banking and insurance is interesting, and he argues that regulation of investor-owned firms has effectively made the mutual model less attractive. Anyway, well worth a read if you want to get into this stuff in more detail.