PhD student Nataliya Nedzhvetskaya was awarded a $50,000 Dissertation Grant from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth for a project titled, "Employee Activism: Mobilizing Workers as Corporate Stakeholders."
Abstract: This project seeks to understand the scale, scope, and spread of employee activism, workplace protest, and its impact on corporate stock prices in the United States. The author builds on an existing longitudinal dataset—the Dynamics of Collective Action by Stanford University—to understand employee activism and understand its use as an alternative to employees leaving the firm. She then will attempt to understand how employee activism spreads by tracking the occurrence of employee protests across industry or social movement networks. Finally, she examines how employee activism affects the share price of a corporation.