The Center for Distributed Ownership advances research, policy design, and cross-sector coalition building in support of a single proposition: that broad and durable prosperity requires broad and durable ownership of productive capital by ordinary Americans.
The Center for Distributed Ownership was founded on the observation that the dominant policy frameworks of the last half-century — progressive taxation, income transfers, social insurance programs — have failed to close the wealth gap in any sustained way. This is not a partisan critique. It is an empirical one. The top 1% of Americans now hold more net wealth than the bottom 50% combined.
CDO advances an alternative framework: Universal Basic Ownership. The core argument is structural. When returns to capital consistently exceed returns to labor, income policy alone cannot produce broadly shared prosperity. The variable that matters — the one that distinguishes the financially secure from the financially precarious — is not what people earn. It is what they own.
We work at the intersection of academic research, policy design, and legislative advocacy to develop the specific mechanisms — capital accounts, worker ownership structures, community land equity, reformed asset taxation — that can distribute ownership at scale without dismantling the market mechanisms that generate the returns worth distributing.
CDO is nonpartisan. Our work is grounded in empirical research and designed to be useful across the political spectrum to anyone serious about the problem of concentrated capital in a democratic society.
We develop and analyze legislative proposals that would broaden capital ownership at scale: universal capital accounts funded at birth, reformed inheritance and asset tax structures, incentives for broad-based equity compensation, and ownership provisions in public investment frameworks.
We examine the structural barriers that prevent ordinary Americans from building ownership — including the mechanics of compounding, the design of retirement systems, access to equity markets, and the role of patient capital in community wealth formation. We identify policy interventions at each barrier.
We study and support the institutions that distribute ownership at the community level: worker-owned enterprises, community land trusts, employee stock ownership plans, and place-based investment vehicles. These structures are not experiments — they are proven mechanisms operating at insufficient scale.
An analysis of capital account proposals across six countries, with design recommendations for a U.S. framework that achieves scale without displacing existing asset-building programs.
Read the Brief →A longitudinal analysis of wealth distribution trends and a critique of income-focused policy assumptions in light of persistent capital concentration across four decades of reform efforts.
Read the Paper →Every year, tens of thousands of small businesses close because no succession plan exists. This paper examines the case for worker ownership as the default option in federally supported business transition programs.
Read the Paper →We welcome inquiries from policymakers, researchers, journalists, and practitioners working on ownership, wealth distribution, and capital access. To receive our publications and event announcements, enter your email below.