Paper: Beliefs and Demand for Employee Ownership Among Young Adults (with Fabio Landini)

👉https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5362985

Policy takeaway:

💡 Low-cost informational interventions can boost societal support for employee ownership.

But belief updating alone may not trigger career choices → deeper barriers remain.

Methodological note:

👉Demand effects: shift in policy preferences persists even in an obfuscated follow-up survey
👉(Non-preregistered) analysis of open-text responses with human coders + ChatGPT adjudication of disputes

Implications:

👉Worker ownership has the potential to improve firm and worker outcomes

👉Uptake is low not only due to wealth constraints, risk aversion or decision costs, as emphasized by traditional explanations, but also due to biased priors and negative narratives.

We also asked: “What’s the first word you think of when you hear co-op?”

Control: “exploitation,” “low pay,” “instability.”
Treatment: “solidarity,” “cooperation,” “jobs.”

Information reduced negative first-order concerns about cooperatives and increased positive ones.

We exposed half the sample to expert-based judgments.

Result:

✅ Beliefs shifted (more optimistic)
✅ Policy support ↑ (“govt should support the creation of co-ops”)
❌ BUT career intentions did not change

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Left-leaning and more educated respondents hold more optimistic prior beliefs about cooperatives

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We also asked a sample of international experts to evaluate existing evidence across similar performance dimensions.

🔍 Priors: Young adults were much more pessimistic than international experts about the relative performance of worker cooperatives.

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We ran a preregistered experiment guided by a detailed pre-analysis plan involving 2,000 young adults in Italy.

We asked: what do people believe about worker co-ops vs conventional firms (firm productivity, survival, inequality, employment stability)?

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