Research & Insights

Concerns about corporate concentration and political risk aren't new. In this piece, Tom Powdrill traces a striking 1947 passage from Germany's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), shaped by the trauma of Nazism, warning that monopolistic companies can "jeopardize freedom in the state" and calling for antitrust action, ownership caps, and worker codetermination. Nearly 80 years later, as ownership and control concentrate again, the CDU's postwar diagnosis reads as remarkably prescient. A short, sharp reminder that predistributive thinking has deep roots across the political spectrum.

In this Q&A with the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, PDI Co-Founder and Executive Director Delilah Rothenberg discusses where predistribution stands today, what it looks like when investors apply a predistribution lens, and how the concept applies to AI-driven labor disruption. Delilah unpacks the macro-financial case for treating inequality as a material risk, explains why broadening equity-linked compensation beyond corporate executives may be a stronger response to AI-driven productivity gains than Universal Basic Income or a Sovereign Wealth Fund alone, and shares where PDI sees the greatest resistance and opportunities for investors to act.

In this paper, the Predistribution Initiative (PDI) explores how economic inequality is a macro-financial risk to markets and diversified portfolios. It explains how inequality manifests across people, firms, regions, and capital value chains and traces structural drivers—including financialization, deregulation, monetary policy, market concentration, and traditional corporate governance structures.  Proposals are made for predistributive solutions such as living wages, freedom of association and collective bargaining, grievance mechanisms, employee and community ownership models, and corporate governance reform that better aligns the incentives of investors, investees, and their stakeholders.

This 2-pager describes the Predistribution AI Lab, a new initiative advancing bipartisan, ownership-based policy solutions to economic dislocation in the US caused by AI and automation. It lays out the Lab's core concept: Broad-Based Equity Compensation (BEC), a three-pillar model giving workers, communities, and creators current income, equity participation, and diversified, portable investment accounts as AI reshapes the economy. The 2-pager also introduces the Lab's June 2026 paper series, Beyond Ghost GDP: Who Owns Our Future?, which examines the risks of AI-driven economic disruption and proposes a predistributive blueprint for the transition.

As employee ownership gains traction across the political spectrum, Tom Powdrill draws on a groundbreaking Spanish initiative to argue that ownership alone isn't enough. Examining the report from Spain's International High-level Expert Committee on Democracy at Work, convened to activate a long-dormant constitutional provision, Tom highlights its two-pillar framework distinguishing ownership (participation in wealth creation) from voice (participation in governance decisions). The Committee's ambitious proposals include minimum equity thresholds of 2–10% for companies based on size, alongside citizen-controlled investment funds that diversify worker wealth beyond a single employer. Tom argues this distinction, that equity participation is not a substitute for collective bargaining or genuine governance participation, should inform how companies, investors, and policymakers everywhere approach broadening economic participation.

In his latest post, PDI Project Lead on Broadening Corporate Governance Participation, Tom Powdrill zeroes in on a timely report from Mainstream — a pro-Burnham Labour faction — titled The Productive State: A Framework for Manchesterism. The report makes a supply-side case for public corporations in energy, water, housing, and transport, but what makes it especially relevant to PDI's work is the governance model it proposes: arm's-length operational independence, workers on boards as a foundational design feature, and democratic accountability running outward to workers and communities rather than upward to ministers. As Tom puts it, corporate governance reform is not merely an accountability mechanism, it is a building block of predistribution.

As calls grow for "broad-based ownership" of AI, PDI Executive Director Delilah Rothenberg examines what that should actually look like and why the details of design matter as much as the concept itself. Drawing on PDI's Beyond Ghost GDP research, the ImpactAlpha article argues that solutions like universal basic income or a centralized sovereign wealth fund leave concentrated power unchecked and people dependent on top-down payouts. Instead, Delilah makes the case for direct household wealth-building and governance participation for workers, communities, and content creators, extending the equity-linked compensation long enjoyed by executives to those whose labor and data create value.

The first paper in PDI’s Predistribution AI Lab series models how declining returns to labor and rising unemployment could ripple through consumption, tax revenue, mortgage and corporate debt, equities, pensions, and insurance assets - and ultimately diversified investment portfolios. Across four scenarios (three drawn from Dario Amodei’s unemployment projections, one from historical labor trends), it frames AI as an inflection point that could either deepen these risks or spur a redesign of economic structures to avoid them.

The second paper in PDI’s Predistribution AI Lab series proposes practical responses to the risks raised in Part I - chiefly broadening equity-linked compensation and corporate governance to include the workers, communities, and content creators (“human” and “social capital”) who create value alongside executives and investors. Against a backdrop of declining returns to labor and shareholder-first governance, it argues that broadening ownership can realign stakeholder incentives, bring wider perspectives to safe AI development, and sustain the aggregate demand the economy and investment portfolios depend on.