Shaista Jaffer, a PhD candidate in Management, specializing in Finance, at the Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa, has won the 2025-2026 J.H. Stewart Reid Memorial Fellowship. The $5,000 scholarship honours the memory of CAUT’s first executive secretary.
Jaffer’s research explores the intersection of corporate finance and labour economics, examining how corporate share repurchases affect employee wages, job stability and bargaining power during collective agreement negotiations. She investigates 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?
Jaffer employs a multi-stage empirical approach, analyzing over 20 years of U.S. financial and labour contract data using econometric modelling and Natural Language Processing. Dr. Ali Akyol supervises her research, which is part of a SSHRC Insight Grant-funded project on the strategic use of share repurchases.
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, all from the University of Ottawa. She currently serves as a Student Researcher at the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada and previously worked as a Business Development and Strategy Manager at a healthcare startup.
Jaffer has 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.
She is a recipient of the Telfer PhD Full Tuition Scholarship and Bursary for her doctoral studies. She is also a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Award for Community Service and won the Telfer SSHRC Storytellers Internal Competition.
