Employee Financial Participation in European Companies

There is discrepancy of the diffusion of Financial Participation schemes in EU member and candidate countries. The incidence of FP is conditional on country specific characteristics, firm specific characteristics and/or trade unions attitude. A supportive government and legal framework and a friendly trade union attitude may lead to increasing level of FP incidence. Companies that use other HRM measures (e.g. training) as well as large companies may be more prone to using FP schemes. Looking at the benefits and drawbacks of the variety of qualitative datasets which contain information on FP, we choose the EWCS dataset for our analyzes because of the high response rates, the high geographic coverage of EU member and candidate countries, the large number of observations, and because the respondents of the questionnaire are employees not the management. Our econometric results suggest that FP schemes used in the EU are discriminatory rather than providing equal opportunity for all employees - discriminatory with respect to gender and selective with respect to employee category, education level, size and sector of activity of the company.