Privatization in Portugal: Employee Owners or Just Happy Employees?

Abstract

The aim of this article is to evaluate the impact of measures designed to enhance employee ownership in the context of the Portuguese privatization process. The authors seek to quantify the advantages offered to employees in the bundle of special conditions they were entitled to, using data from 60 privatization operations between 1989 and 1999. The risky decision to buy shares in their own firms sometimes enabled employees to make a good investment, when stock market activity permitted it. In other cases, in spite of the breadth of the potential benets offered to encourage employees, the results associated with these investments were actually negative.