Professor Niels Mygind shortlisted for the Nigel Mason prize
The nomination referred to the recent article: Stakeholder drivers toward different types of employee ownership – with some Danish evidence, International Review of Applied Economics, 40(3-4): 467-492. Mygind was one of the three researchers, shortlisted this year. The prize was at an event in August at Kellogg College, Oxford given to David Ellerman, see https://www.kellogg.ox.ac.uk/news/a-celebration-of-employee-ownership-research-at-kellogg-college/
Mygind’s article outlines a theory about how individual or collective attitudes result in different drivers in relation to different types of employee ownership, which are dominating in countries with relatively many employee-owned firms: 1) The worker cooperative as known from Italy, France, and Spain including the Mondragon variant with a strong emphasis on employees’ individual accounts. 2) The British Employee Ownership Trust, EOT. 3) The US Employee Stock Ownership Plan, ESOP.
Denmark is used as a case to illustrate the theoretical points, and to discuss the possible consequences of a new law from January 2026 concerning employee takeovers.
The recent article has connections to some of Mygind’s earlier research. An article from 1987 “Are Self-Managed Firms Efficient? points to the existence of collective goal of the employees as a possible answer to the “Illyrian problem”. If the employees follow the collective goal of the survival and development of the firm, they will not have the “Illyrian” behavior proposed by Ward (1958). Mygind developed this further in the 1992 article, “The choice of ownership”, and broadened it for more stakeholders in the 2009 article on “Stakeholder ownership and maximization”.
One of the main new elements in the nominated 2026 article is to include the goals of the selling owner. This is crucial for understanding why some owners choose the EOT or the ESOP as a solution of the succession problem, and it is also important for understanding the future development in Denmark after the introduction of new legislation on employee ownership in the start of this year.
References
Mygind, N. 1987. “Are Self-Managed Firms Efficient? The experience of Danish Fully and Partly Self-Managed Firms." Advances in the Economic Analysis of participatory and Labor-Managed Firms 2(1): 243-323.
Mygind, N. 1992. “The choice of ownership”. Economic and industrial democracy 13(3): 359-399.
Mygind, N. 2009. “Stakeholder ownership and maximization”, Corporate Governance: The International Journal of Business in Society, Vol. 9 no. 2, 2009, pp. 158-174
Ward, B. 1958. “The firm in Illyria: Market syndicalism.” American Economic Review, 48(4): 566-589.
