Faculty Profiles

June 21, 2011

Economist Kurtulus Receives Huber Fellowship

Assistant Professor  Fidan Ana Kurtulus (economics) has received a prestigious 2011 Michael W. Huber Fellowship from School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University for her research on employee ownership and shared capitalism.

The fellowship recognizes Kurtulus's trailblazing research on participatory workplaces. Her analysis of worker attitudes towards employee ownership, worker participation, and profit sharing has appeared in leading publications, such as the Industrial and Labor Relations Review and the 2011 Annual LERA Research Volume Employee Ownership and Shared Capitalism: New Directions and Debates for the 21st Century.

Kurtulus’s latest research, co-authored with economist Douglas Kruse, explores how worker participation can mitigate economic downturns. Kurtulus says, “Companies with employee ownership have shown greater employment stability in face of the current Great Recession. It's remarkable that better workplace organization can soften the impact of even a severe macroeconomic crisis.” These results were widely cited, including coverage in the New York Times, after Kurtulus presented them in May 2011 at the London School of Economics.

In 2009-2010, Kurtulus was a J. Robert Beyster Fellow at Rutgers University. She is one of several UMass scholars recognized for work on shared capitalism. Other recent fellowship recipients include Daphne Berry, a doctoral candidate at the Isenberg School of Management, Dustin Avent-Holt, a doctoral candidate in Sociology, and Dr. Erik Olsen and Dr. Philip Melizzo, both recent alumni of the UMass Amherst Economics Ph.D. program.

With a new certificate in Applied Economic Research on Cooperative Enterprises and a cluster of scholars in the shared-capitalism network, UMass Amherst is a leading center for research on participatory workplaces.