These competitive fellowships identify the most distinguished young scholars around the country and support their scholarly work. SMLR has developed the leading interdisciplinary research program in the world on issues of shared capitalism and the role of the corporation in society.

The 2017-2018 Fellow

Marjorie Kelly, Executive Vice President and Senior Fellow, The Democracy Collaborative.

Education:  M.A. Journalism, University of Missouri School of Journalism.

Title of research: The Role of Finance in Taking Employee Ownership to Scale.



The 2016-2017 Fellow

Image of SMLR Photo Not Available

Karla Walter, Director, Employment Policy, Center for American Progress, Washington, D.C., Masters of Urban Planning and Policy, University of Illinois at Chicago College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs. Research Topic: Policies to support broad-based equity compensation in entrepreneurial start-ups, the tech sector, and the economy at large.  Methodology: Analysis of legislation and policy.



The 2015-2016 Fellow

John Bizjak is currently the Robert and Maria Lowdon Professor of Finance at Texas Christian University (TCU).  Professor Bizjak's research interests include employee compensation, corporate governance, and antitrust law. He has published in the American Economic Review, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Accounting and Economics among others. His work has also been cited in The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and Business Week.  He served a two-year academic fellowship at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, where he provided economic analysis on topics such as nomination of board members, insider trading, option expensing and other issues related to corporate governance.  He currently serves as an advisor and consultant to Incentive Labs LLC on issues pertaining to corporate governance and executive compensation. The research project related to the Fellowship examines the incentive and retention effects of the use of broad-based equity award plans with performance-contingent vesting conditions.


The 2014-2015 Fellows

Bo Cowgill

Bo Cowgill is a Ph.D. candidate in business and public policy at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley.


Abhishek Nagaraj

Abhishek Nagaraj, a J. Robert Beyster Fellow, is exploring the benefits and drawbacks of shared ownership organizations on digital innovation on the Internet using a quantitative analysis and randomized field experiments.  He is a Ph.D. candidate in technological innovation, entrepreneurship and society, at  the MIT Sloan School of Management.



The 2013-2014 Fellows

Alicia Eads

Alicia Eads, a J. Robert Beyster Fellow, is analyzing what workers know and how they feel about private equity owners and shared capitalism plans in order to understand how workers’ perceptions influence the outcomes of private equity ownership and shared capitalism plans. She is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Cornell University.


Minsun Ji

Minsun Ji, a J. Robert Beyster Fellow, is examining how workers could successfully start their own worker-owned businesses as entrepreneurs. She will study the relationships between these new cooperative roles and ideas with employee organizations in different institutional milieus in the United States and other countries. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver.



The 2012-2013 Fellows

Michael Bikard

Michael Bikard, a J. Robert Beyster Fellow, is studying under which conditions do organizations translate —or fail to translate— scientific discoveries into new technologies using simultaneous discoveries in science to study the impact of shared capitalism on subsequent technological innovation. He is a Ph.D. candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management in the Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Strategy Program.


Danny Yagan

Danny Yagan, a J. Robert Beyster Fellow, is considering how to design retirement accounts that foster diversification and thus reduce the risk to profit sharing and employee stock ownership. He is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California at Berkeley with a doctorate in economics from Harvard University.


William Gerken

William Gerken, a J. Robert Beyster Fellow, is focusing on institutional investment firms to explore what factors determine the allocation of employee ownership to specific investment managers within a firm and why the concentration of managerial ownership varies across competing firms. He is an assistant professor of finance at Auburn University through this summer of 2012 and will join the University of Kentucky as an assistant professor of finance starting August 1st, 2012. He has a Ph.D. in finance from Michigan State University.


Tony Fang

Tony Fang, a J. Robert Beyster Fellow, plans to learn about firm performance, worker earnings, and firm stability from the largest longitudinal dataset on employee ownership in North America. He is a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business during the 2011-2012 academic year and an Associate Professor at York University in Industrial Relations and Human Resource Management with a Ph.D. in industrial relations and human resource management from the University of Toronto.


The 2011-2012 Fellows

Ilona Babenko

Ilona Babenko, a J. Robert Beyster Fellow and Beyster Visiting Assistant Professor, is researching if there are corporate benefits associated with broad-based employee stock option programs and employee stock purchase plans (ESPPs). She is an assistant professor of finance at the Arizona State University Carey School of Business with a doctorate in economics from the University of California at Berkeley.


Daphne Berry

Daphne Berry, a J. Robert Beyster Fellow, is looking at quality of care, participatory decision-making, and worker ownership in the home health-aide industry. She is a Ph.D. candidate in management and organization studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.


Jed Devaro

Jed DeVaro, a J. Robert Beyster Fellow, is exploring incentive compensation, worker participation, and the delegation of worker authority. He is the Wang Family Professor in management and economics at the California State University at East Bay College of Business and Economics. He has a doctorate in economics from Stanford University.


Yael Hochberg

Yael Hochberg, a J. Robert Beyster Fellow, is researching whether stock options granted to the rank and file have an incentive effect for those workers. She is an assistant professor of finance at the Northwestern University Kellog School of Management with a doctorate in finance from Stanford University.


Laura Lindsey

Laura Lindsey, a J. Robert Beyster Fellow, is researching how firms that grant options broadly to non-executive employees might contribute to firm value. She is an associate professor of finance at the Arizona State University Carey School of Business with a doctorate in economics from Stanford University.


David Madland

David Madland, a J. Robert Beyster Fellow, is conducting a review of state and federal policies on broad-based employee ownership and profit sharing. He is Director of the American Worker Project at the Center for American Progress with a doctorate in government from Georgetown University.


Lilly Song

Lily Song, a J. Robert Beyster Fellow, is examining democratic wealth generation in emerging green sectors such as worker cooperatives and other formats that may provide access to tangible gains for working-poor families and other marginalized populations. She is a doctoral candidate in urban studies and planning at MIT.



The 2010-2011 Fellows

Karen Bernhardt Walther

Karen F. Bernhardt-Walther, a lecturer in economics at Ohio State University, is working on a theoretical model of shared ownership in different organizational forms. She has a Ph.D. in business economics from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.


Mark Kaswan

Mark Kaswan, a postdoctoral fellow who recently received his doctorate in political science from UCLA; studies the role of worker ownership in the political economy of a democracy. Mark is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Texas at Brownsville specializing in political theory.


Paige Parker Ouimet

Paige Parker Ouimet, an assistant professor in finance at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler School of Business, is conducting research on broad-based stock options and corporate performance. She has a Ph.D. and M.B.A in finance from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.


Sally Sledge

Sally Sledge, an associate professor at Norfolk State University’s School of Business, is examining the attitudes towards employee ownership of business school faculty and students. She has a Ph.D. in international business and strategic management from the College of Business and Public Administration of Old Dominion University.



The 2009-2010 Fellows

Edward Carberry

Edward Carberry, Ph.D., an assistant professor in business-society management at the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University, is studying the characteristics and consequences of employee ownership and systems of decentralized organizational authority. He has a Ph.D. in sociology from Cornell University.


Joe Hsueh

Joe Hsueh has a Ph.D. in systems dynamics from the MIT Sloan School. Hsueh has been working with colleagues at MIT on a web-based “flight simulator” that allows students and actual founders of entrepreneurial start-ups to dynamically explore the combination of equity and profit sharing and other human resource management practices in combination with various business plans in order to immediately view the impact of one decision on another decision.


Pierre KrempPierre Kremp, an assistant professor at the HEC  Paris Business School, has studied the diffusion of both employee stock ownership and general stock ownership and its consequences on wealth inequality using the Survey of Consumer Finances. He has a Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University.  


Fidan Kurtulus

Fidan Ana Kurtulus, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, is examining employee
ownership and employment stability. She has a Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University.