Profits for All? - The Cost & Benefits of Employee Ownership

Private ownership confers numerous benefits, including stronger performance incentives, better use of privately owned assets, and improved access to finance. We argue that privately owned land could be both an asset and a liability, and overall net benefits of land ownership are contingent on the quality of surrounding institutions. We present a simple model and empirical evidence based on the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) in Russia, which clearly demonstrates such conditionality in the case of land ownership by Russian industrial firms. Consistently with earlier literature, land ownership facilitates firms' access to finance (the “de Soto effect”), but at the same time entails additional risks and obstacles to doing business. When the quality of property rights protection and other key institutions is poor, land ownership could have an adverse effect on firms' performance.

"[This book is] the most authoritative assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of recent trends toward the commercialization of health care," says Robert Pear of The New York Times. This major study by the Institute of Medicine examines virtually all aspects of for-profit health care in the United States, including the quality and availability of health care, the cost of medical care, access to financial capital, implications for education and research, and the fiduciary role of the physician. In addition to the report, the book contains 15 papers by experts in the field of for-profit health care covering a broad range of topicsâ€"from trends in the growth of major investor-owned hospital companies to the ethical issues in for-profit health care. "The report makes a lasting contribution to the health policy literature." â€"Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law.