2025-2026 Award Winner - Shaista Jaffer
Shaista Jaffer is a PhD candidate in Management, specializing in Finance, at the Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa.
Her doctoral research is situated at the intersection of corporate finance and labor economics, investigating how corporate share repurchases impact employee wages, job stability, and bargaining power during collective agreement negotiations. Jaffer's work addresses a timely and underexplored question: do firms strategically use buybacks—a tool to boost shareholder returns—to suppress wage growth and gain leverage over their workforce?
To answer this, her research employs a multi-stage empirical approach, compiling and analyzing over 20 years of U.S. financial and labor contract data using econometric modeling and Natural Language Processing (NLP). This project is supervised by Dr. Ali Akyol and is part of a SSHRC Insight Grant-funded project on the strategic use of share repurchases.
A dedicated University of Ottawa alumna, Jaffer holds a Master of Science in Management (Finance), a Master of Arts in Economics, and a Joint Honours Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Economics from the institution. Her academic pursuits are enriched by diverse professional experiences, including her current role as a Student Researcher at the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada (FCAC) and previous work as a Business Development and Strategy Manager at a healthcare startup. These roles have provided her with a unique lens on how financial theory, corporate strategy, and policy intersect in the real world.
Jaffer has a strong publication record, having co-authored book chapters on cryptocurrency and green bonds, contributed to the open-access educational resource The FinTech Explorer, and authored a master's thesis on the hedging behaviour of Bitcoin. Her doctoral studies are supported by the Telfer PhD Full Tuition Scholarship and Bursary. Among her many distinctions, she is a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Award for Community Service and was a winner of the Telfer SSHRC Storytellers Internal Competition.