NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J., May 6 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Rutgers University's School of Management and Labor Relations (SMLR) has established the Louis O. Kelso Fellowships for the study of broadened ownership of capital in a democratic society.

The fellowships honor Kelso, a San Francisco merchant banker, lawyer and political economist. Kelso created the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) and worked on other approaches to expand the ability of workers and citizens to acquire capital. He died in 1991. The fellowships are supported by the Employee Ownership Foundation (EOF), Washington, D.C.

The foundation will provide funds to support young and seasoned scholars. "The School of Management and Labor Relations takes great pleasure in the creation of the Kelso Fellowships because Louis Kelso's ideas and financial innovations have made such a critical contribution to broadened capital ownership in the United States," said Dean David Finegold. "The fellows will benefit Rutgers by allowing us to assemble the world's largest network of scholars on a topic that is significant for the social sciences and humanities, and is an area of ongoing study by specialists on our faculty."

The first Kelso Fellows are Steven Freeman, a resident scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, who is studying ESOP adoption and functioning in times of adversity; Ryan Hammond, a doctoral candidate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is examining companies in green technology industries that share ownership; and Jeffrey Moriarty, an associate professor at Bentley University, who is exploring the business ethics of firms in an economic democracy.

The other Kelso Fellows are Erik Olsen, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, who is researching the emergence and performance of majority employee-owned ESOPs, and Frank Shipper, a professor at Salisbury University, who is writing case studies of firms with ESOPs and high employee involvement.

A native of Denver, Kelso graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he briefly taught after earning degrees in business administration and finance, and in law. Following service as a Naval Intelligence Officer during World War II, he established a business and corporate law firm, and later founded and was chair of the merchant bank, Kelso and Co.

Kelso is the author of many books, including The Capitalist Manifesto (1958) and the New Capitalists (1961), both with the late philosopher Mortimer Adler, and Democracy and Economic Power, with his wife, Patricia Hetter Kelso. Patricia Kelso now heads the Kelso Institute in San Francisco.

SOURCE Rutgers University's School of Management and Labor Relations

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