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Do employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) constitute a genuine revolution in industrial relations? Employee Ownership: Revolution or Ripoff, by management expert Joseph Blasi (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 335 pp., $27.95), looks at the promises and problems of ESOPs as a means of improving labor-management relations and industry vitality.
Privatization, classical liberalism, free-market economic thought—these ideas continue to set the intellectual trend as the '80s come to a close. Privatization: An Economic Analysis, by John Vickers and George Yarrow (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 453 pp., $39.95), offers an up-to-date and comprehensive assessment of Britain's extensive effort to sell off government assets and enterprises.
The Theory of Market Failure, edited by REASON author Tyler Cowen (Fairfax, Va.: George Mason University Press, 384 pp., $21.75) brings together seminal articles in which prominent economists such as Ronald Coase, Harold Demsetz, and James Buchanan challenge the view that the existence of public goods is an automatic rationale for government intervention. The volume includes two case studies of the private provision of public goods—fire protection and recreational service—by Robert W. Poole, Jr.
Another collection, The Firm, the Market, and the Law, includes some of the key writings of economist R.H. Coase (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 217 pp., $29.95), who has had a profound impact on modern economics, particularly in his examination of the effect of the law on the working of the economic system.