Employment Stabilization Inside Firms: An Empirical Investigation of Worker Cooperatives

There is evidence that worker cooperatives provide a greater stabilization of employment compared to capital‐managed firms. While the reasons of this behaviour can be ascribed to their property and governance structure, less is known of the tools to put it into practice. I discuss two possible ways to guarantee employment insurance: by letting wages fluctuate, or by accumulating reinvested profits into an income stabilizing fund that copes with downturns without firing and without reducing wages. In this second case, I find out that asset locks play a wage smoothing role. This may explain the large share of profits that are reinvested in this indivisible and not appropriable fund. I provide evidence for this mechanism by means of original data at the firm level and of first‐hand collected survey data at the individual level on risk perception in a sample of Italian cooperatives.