Dean, Andrés

This paper provides new evidence on the objectives pursued by worker-managed firms (WMFs). The basic neoclassical model assumes that WMFs maximizes net income per member instead of total profits (Ward, 1958). Alternative models suggest that WMFs are not only concerned about income per worker but also about the level of employment.

Based on administrative data combining workers’ earnings histories and unemployment insurance benefits, we document short and long term wage losses for a large sample of Uruguayan formal workers with high tenure. The contribution of this paper is to provide original evidence about job separation costs in a developing country, based on a unique array of social security and unemployment insurance administrative micro-data. Our main findings indicate that workers lose around 38 % of their previous wages in the first quarter after separation, and 1 year after, losses are still more than 14 %.

Using unemployment insurance records and social security labor histories, we provide evidence of the impacts of recent changes in the unemployment insurance system of Uruguay. We estimate the effects on unemployment duration and post unemployment wages.

This paper investigates the relationship between workplace democracy and job flows by comparing the behavior of worker-managed firms (WMFs) and conventional firms (CFs). The empirical analysis relies on high frequency administrative firm-level panel data from Uruguay over the period April 1996–July 2009. The main findings of the paper are that (1) WMFs exhibit much more stable job dynamics than CFs; (2) both types of firms have decreasing in age and increasing in size gross job creation profiles; (3) there are heterogeneous employment regimes within WMFs: job creation and destruction rates are high for hired workers and very low for members. This paper contributes to the literature on the role of institutions in shaping job flows. Our results have important implications for the understanding of the allocative efficiency effects of worker participation.

El presente artículo busca ofrecer una visión panorámica de la literatura teórica que aborda un problema de investigación relativamente novedoso, al menos en el medio académico local. ¿Por qué las cooperativas de trabajadores representan una proporción marginal del universo de empresas y del empleo total en cualquier economía de mercado contemporánea?