Research On The Institutional Arrangements Of Property Rights Of Human Capital In High-tech Companies

High-tech companies belong to knowledge and technology-concentrated industry, So R&D staff and managers play a core function in these companies. The traditional way of the allocation of the enterprise ownership, that is the shareholders are the owners of the company, managers just obtain fixed wages, obviously can't apply to high-tech companies. This Thesis regards enterprise as a special contract signed by the non-human capital and human capital. Because of the nature of the property rights of human capital, this type of contract is incomplete, which give birth to a public domain between non-human capital and human capital. This public domain is the residual claim and residual rights of control. In the high-tech companies, human capital is highly heterogeneous, highly special, cooperative, creative and highly influential. So the transaction costs produced by the incompleteness of the enterprise contract will be reduced, if human capital shares the enterprise ownership. However, the allocation of the enterprise ownership is dynamic. When the company founded, the employers can obtain the entire enterprise ownership, because human capital don't have proper signal to show them. After they enter the company, they can accumulate special human capital with the"Learning by Doing"process, which will strengthen their negotiation capability. As a result, human capital can obtain part of the enterprise ownership at last. There are three ways for human capital to share enterprise ownership in high-tech companies, including MBO, ESOP and ESO. Many high-tech companies in our country made a lot of meaningful explorations in this field after Reform and Opening. The most classical cases are MBO in Stone Company, ESOP in Lenovo and ESO in Shanghai Belling Company. The result of the empirical research shows that there is a cubic relationship between the performance of the company and the proportion of the stock that human capital hold. So, it will improve the performance of the company if the human capital can share the enterprise ownership.