The “Best Conference Paper Award” distinguishes a PhD category that emphasizes the work of researchers in the initial phases of their careers. The winner of the 8^th EMES Conference’s “Best Paper Award” in the PhD category is Thibault Mirabel, for his paper: “Survival Advantage of Worker Buyouts over Newly Created Worker-Owned Firms”.

Thibault is a PhD student from the University of Paris Nanterre (France); he is currently working on his thesis, which focuses on the economic analysis of worker cooperatives.

Thibault testifies:

“I would like to thank the scientific committee as well as the organizers and participants. It is a great honour to receive the Best Paper Award in the PhD category of this EMES conference for my paper ‘Survival Advantage of Worker Buyouts over Newly Created Worker-Owned Firms’. This paper offers a survival analysis of worker cooperatives, distinguishing among these enterprises on the basis of their creation mode—whether created from scratch (newly created worker-owned firms) or converted from existing firms (worker buyouts). The main result is that worker buyouts survive on average longer than newly created worker-owned firms; this is even true of worker buyouts of conventional firms in difficulty. I would also like to take advantage of this occasion to say a word about another paper I have published this year in the Journal of Participation and Employee Ownership, titled ‘Past, present and future of empirical research on employee-owned firms: a structured literature review over 1970-2019’. It is a literature analysis of about 300 empirical studies of enterprises owned mostly by their workers, such as worker cooperatives and other forms of employee-owned firms. This paper maps the empirical field of employee-owned firms in terms of methodology, main topics, countries studied, and so on. It also provides, in its Appendix, the bibliographic list of all the papers reviewed.

Thank you again for the EMES research conference; it has been very nice and fruitful. See you at the next one!”

If you want to comment on Thibault’s work or share with him your own related research, we encourage you to contact him directly.

To download the full version of the EMES Selected Conference papers, click here.