[Seminaire CREM] Beliefs and Demand for Employee Ownership Among Young Adults

Abstract:
Employee-owned firms with majority workforce control—such as worker cooperatives—remain rare in market economies, despite evidence that they perform at least as well as investor-owned firms across various contexts. Why does capital typically hire labor, rather than the other way around? We argue that beliefs help explain this puzzle. In a preregistered experiment with 2,000 young Italians, participants were randomly exposed to information from an international expert survey. Respondents held more pessimistic prior beliefs about worker cooperatives relative to experts. Information exposure led to more optimistic beliefs, increased support for pro-cooperative policies, and shifted career preferences relatively toward cooperatives, though not in absolute terms. Text analysis of open-ended responses shows fewer negative and more positive first-order concerns about cooperatives in the treatment group.