NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J., June 13, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Rutgers University's School of Management and Labor Relations (SMLR) has announced the recipients of the Louis O. Kelso Fellowships for the study of employee stock ownership in corporations and broadened ownership of capital in a democratic society.

The fellowships honor Louis O. 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 of Washington, D.C. This is the third year of the fellowship program.

The Fellowships 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 new Kelso Fellows are:

• Dustin Avent-Holt, a Louis O. Kelso Fellow, who is studying wage and stock-based income in the deregulated U.S. airline industry.  He is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
• Francesco Bova, a Louis O. Kelso Fellow, who is examining the effect of employee ownership such as ESOPs, on improving a firm's transparency with its employees and the market in general. He is an assistant professor of accounting at the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management with a doctorate in accounting from the Yale University School of Management.
• Adam Cobb, a Louis O. Kelso Fellow, who is analyzing the role played by power differences between owners, managers and employees in determining how the corporate-based retirement system emerged and has evolved.  He will be an assistant professor, University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Finance in the fall and has a doctorate in management and organizations from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business.
• Phillip Melizzo, a Louis O. Kelso Fellow, who is using experimental laboratory methods to help isolate the independent and complementary motivational effects of employee ownership and participation in decision-making.   He is an assistant professor of economics at the College of Wooster and has a doctorate in economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
• Trevor Young-Hyman, a  Louis O. Kelso Fellow, who is researching worker ownership, ESOPs, and innovation in automated manufacturing in the Midwestern United States.  He is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

A native of Denver, Kelso graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he briefly taught at the law school 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 Company.

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.

The fellows meet twice a year in order to present academic papers, receive feedback from each other, and develop collaborations.   This year, the Mid-year Fellows Workshop was sponsored by John D. Menke of Menke & Associates through the Louis O. Kelso Traveling Fellowships which made the participation of all current and past fellows possible at a conference which was held at Rutgers University.

Two Rutgers researchers who are experts on these topics serve as faculty mentors, Professor Douglas L. Kruse, an economist, and Joseph R. Blasi, a sociologist,  the J. Robert Beyster Professor at SMLR, who coordinates  the fellowship program.  Professor Richard Freeman, the Herbert Ascherman Professor of Economics at Harvard University, also serves as a faculty mentor.

For information on the current and past Kelso Fellows, see: http://smlr.rutgers.edu/kelso-fellows

SOURCE Rutgers University's School of Management and Labor Relations

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