Determinants of Asset Ownership: A Study of the Carpentry Trade

Abstract

We use a dataset describing ownership of productive assets in the carpentry trade to evaluate several factors influencing the allocation of asset ownership among employers and employees. The findings suggest that the allocation involves a tradeoff between two incentive effects influencing how the employee uses the asset and what the employer decides it should be used for. There is also evidence that more expensive assets and assets that are shared by more than one employee are more likely to be owned by the employer. The results suggest that a general theory of asset ownership should be able to account for at least these four effects.