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If elected, Mitt Romney would be the first U.S. president to have direct experience with ESOPs. Bain and Company, which Romney once headed, set up an ESOP in 1985, paying what in retrospect appeared to be an inflated price for 30% of the company.

Mitt Romney left Bain & Company in 1984 to lead the spinoff of the private equity company Bain Capital. The following year, Bain & Company set up a leveraged ESOP, which bought 30% of the company from its founding members for $200 million.

Baker & McKenzie, in partnership with the National Association of Stock Plan Professionals and the Global Equity Organization, have developed an app for Apple and Android devices to answer questions about different types of equity compensation in countries around the world.

The Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (MCC), the most famous network of worker cooperatives in the world, announced two major international expansions. The MCC, headquartered in the Basque region of Spain, employs over 80,000 people in over 150 cooperatives.

Fagor Electrodomesticos, the flagship of the Mondragon cooperatives, announced on November 13 that it would file for bankruptcy protection.

Writing in the Guardian, Giles Tremlett described the impact of the economic downtown on the world's largest worker cooperative, the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation

Moog Music, maker of famed synthesizers, announced on June 10 that it was becoming employee-owned.

A new survey by IOMA, a newsletter on defined contribution and pension plans, finds that 40% of the allocations in the largest defined contribution plans are in company stock.

According to an October 11, 2011, article from the Herald, the government-owned newspaper of Zimbabwe, 5% of the shares in public companies in Zimbabwe have been set aside for employees, with a special preference

Back in the 1950s, Louis Kelso, the creator of the modern ESOP, argued that the share of economic growth ordinary workers would capture from their labor would shrink over the next decades, while returns to capital would far outpace economic growth. Economists said Kelso was deluded.