Americans value economic democracy equivalently to a wage increase of $20/hr.

"To provide a further sense of the economic magnitude, we directly benchmark our workplace democracy results with respect to salary offers. Because we also randomized salary offers in $10,000 increments, we are essentially able to generate a labor supply curve based on salary. Using these estimates (see Figure A1-3 and Table A1-2 for details), we estimate that co-determination, ESOPs, and management elections are approximately equivalent to a $70,000, $100,000, and $40,000 increase in salaries holding constant the implied utility that a respondent would get from working at a given hypothetical firm. This translates, on average, to approximately a $20/hour increase in wages. This is likely an upper bound on the wage growth that individuals might be willing to forego so we caution against over-interpreting these magnitudes. Future work, using field experimental methods, are likely better suited to test for the actual wages that individuals might give up for workplace democracy. Nevertheless, our results suggest that workplace democracy preferences are economically meaningful."

empirical


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