Broad-based Employee Stock Ownership: Motives and Outcomes

June 5, 2014 Leave a comment

Broad-based Employee Stock Ownership: Motives and Outcomes

E. Han Kim 

University of Michigan, Stephen M. Ross School of Business

Paige Parker Ouimet 

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
June 10, 2013
Journal of Finance, Forthcoming

Abstract: 
Firms initiating broad-based employee share ownership plans often claim ESOPs increase productivity by improving employee incentives. Do they? The answer depends. Small ESOPs comprising less than 5% of shares, granted by firms with moderate employee size, increase the economic pie, benefitting both employees and shareholders. The effects are much weaker when there are too many employees to mitigate free-riding. Although some large ESOPs increase productivity and employee compensation, the average impacts are small, because they are often implemented for non-incentive purposes, such as conserving cash by substituting wages with employee shares or forming a worker-management alliance to thwart takeover bids.

 

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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