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Employee Ownership Blog
Corey Rosen

Corey Rosen

Employee Ownership Index Now Available at Infinite Equity

In June 2017, the NCEO created the Employee Ownership Index, an index of publicly traded companies that both had won major awards for high engagement management styles and had some form of broad-based employee ownership. The list was updated each year as some companies were added and some dropped off. Since that time, the Index outperformed the S&P 500 by about a 2 to 1 ratio. Until May of this year, the Index was housed at Motif Investments, an online platform that allowed users to develop funds that others could invest in. Motif was sold to Folio, and Folio does not allow that kind of investment. No other platform allows this, so the Index is not available as an investment.

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Corey Rosen

New NCEO Webinars: Financial Wellness for ESOP Participants

Many ESOP companies provide financial wellness education for employees—and even more should. Employees really appreciate the help in learning how to think about wealth-building strategies for the long term, and especially how their ESOP accounts fit into that. But it can be hard to find the time and resources to put together a really effective package, so we have done it for you.

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Corey Rosen

Companies with ESPPs Outperform Those Without Them

A new study by Carver Edison shows that over the last five years, public companies with employee stock purchase plans (ESPPs) had a return on equity of nearly 12% per year, compared to 7% in companies without these plans. They had operating margins of 9.5%, compared to 8.2% for non-ESPP companies, and they had four times the annual sales growth (4% to 1%). Almost half the S&P 500 and 40% of the Russell 3000 offer these plans. The study was based on market-weighted indices of ESPP and non-ESPP companies. It is not possible to tell whether companies that offer these plans tend to be better performers to begin with or whether there is a causal relationship with ESPPs.

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Corey Rosen

U.S. Senator Says Link Employee Ownership to Government Aid

Only a handful of people in Congress have actually worked for an ESOP company, but Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) is one of them. In an interview with Urban Milwaukee on July 3, Johnson suggested linking government assistance to employee ownership. “PPP on average probably provided a grant of around $11,000 per employee. So if we’re going to provide these grants, you know, restore capital, what I will say in exchange for the grant, a business that wants to reopen would then establish a new ownership structure, something like an employee stock ownership plan. I actually worked at one … and it’s a great form of ownership. Every employee participates. They participate in the earnings of the company, generally set up as a retirement type of plan. It’s a really good ownership structure for a capitalist society. I think it would also help alleviate the inequality gap as well.”

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Corey Rosen

SBA Issues PPP Enforcement Guidance

The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) has generated considerable controversy concerning its implementation, fairness, and rules. The Small Business Administration (SBA) is maintaining a FAQ document on the PPP program (PDF) that will be regularly updated. The SBA states, "Borrowers and lenders may rely on the guidance provided in this document as SBA’s interpretation of the CARES Act and of the . . . PPP Interim Final Rules . . . The U.S. government will not challenge lender PPP actions that conform to this guidance, and to the PPP Interim Final Rules and any subsequent rulemaking in effect at the time."

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