Ola Lotherington Vestad

Firm Performance and Worker Representation in Corporate Boards

In ongoing work, Ola Lotherington Vestad is investigating the role of worker representation on firms’ boards of directors. In addition to being responsible for protecting the interests of their members in local wage negotiations, labour unions sometimes have the opportunity to influence business strategy and firm performance by appointing worker representatives to boards of directors. Despite a rather extensive literature that examines the make-up and actions of boards of directors, there is little conclusive evidence on the issue of whether corporate boards influence business strategy and firm performance. In particular, little is known about how firm performance, worker compensation, the organisation of work within firms and a firm’s ability to respond to shocks would be different if workers were better represented at the top of the corporate ladder. Mr Vestad’s project aims at investigating these issues by exploiting quasi-experimental variation in the extent of worker representation on boards combined with detailed worker-firm data.

Mr Vestad works mostly within the fields of applied labour and public economics, currently with an emphasis on the impacts of labour market institutions and regulations on workers, firms and firm owners. He has also examined the financing of occupational pensions, labour mobility and pension portability as well as early retirement issues.

Ola Lotherington Vestad is a Senior Researcher at Statistics Norway in the Research Unit for Microeconomics. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Oslo, an MA in Economic Theory and Econometrics from the Toulouse School of Economics and a BA in Economics from the University of Oslo. He has received research grants from the Norwegian Research Council and from the NBER Retirement Research Consortium. He was a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago and at the Center for Labor Economics of the University of California Berkeley.