Profit sharing and innovation

We investigate the effect of profit sharing on product and process innovation. Profit sharing is a credible commitment on the part of companies to allow their employees to participate in any efficiency gain. Resistance to technical progress becomes less plausible. Moreover, employees are motivated to share their specific information advantage on possibilities to optimize the production process and products with the management. We take account of possible selectivity effects and, using survey data on German companies with and without profit sharing, we test our hypothesis by comparing measures of innovativeness. We apply matching and conditional difference-in-differences and find that the introduction of profit sharing spurs product innovation but has no effect on process innovation.