The United Airline Bankruptcy and the Future of Employee Ownership

Abstract:     
The collapse of the UAL employee stock ownership experiment in UAL's bankruptcy does not demonstrate the inevitable failure of the institutional form any more than the collapse of Enron shows the impossibility of the large publicly held corporation. Rather, UAL suffered from particular design flaws in its stock ownership plan and, more seriously, the absence of complementary institutions focused on the distinctive problems of employee-owned firms.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 7

Accepted Paper Series