Employee Ownership Blog

Avis, Inc., one of the country's largest employee-owned companies, has received an unsolicited purchase offer from HFS, a publicly traded hotel and real estate franchiser. Does the news mean that Avis is for sale? Not really.

According to some reports, employee ownership is sweeping China; according to others, it is still just an occasional experiment.

House Republicans have led an effort to repeal section 133 of the Internal Revenue Code, which allows lenders to exclude 50% of the interest income they receive on loans to certain ESOPs owning over 50% of a company's shares.

An index on public companies with more than 10% employee ownership continues to outperform broad market indices.

A new Supreme Court ruling (Varity v. Howard, 3/19/96) could have a significant effect on all employee benefit plans. The case, which did not involve an ESOP, involved plans by the Varity Corporation to spin off some of its businesses.

First-hand reports from China reach different conclusions about just how much employee ownership there really is in that country.

The first privatization of a federal agency to its employees will soon be completed. The newly formed US Investigations Services, Inc., will employ about 700 people currently working for the Office of Personnel Management's background investigation unit.

A new study by Mary Ducy and Zahid Igbal of Texas Southern University, and Aigbe Akhigbe of Florida Atlantic University, concludes that ESOPs have a negative effect on corporate performance in public firms, although stockholders tend to view ESOP announcements favorably.

The NCEO's annual conference from April 17 to 19 was said to be the "best ever" by a number of attendees. The conference featured a new format designed to reduce the number of speakers on panels and increase the ratio of company attendees to consultants.

A lawsuit by a group of employees unhappy with the United Airlines ESOP has been dismissed. In Sommersby v. State Street Bank, the plaintiffs contended that the wage concessions employees made were too large for the amount of stock they got.

The resurgent Communist Party in Russia is proposing to introduce legislation in the Duma (the legislature) to require that privatized companies become 100% employee owned.

A new study by James Poterba of M.I.T. and Andrew Samwick of Dartmouth has provided the first analysis of the ownership of stock by households that includes ownership through retirement funds.