Joseph Blasi holds the J. Robert Beyster Chair in Employee Stock Ownership at the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University where he teaches the undergraduate and graduate courses in corporate governance. He has an Ed.D. from Harvard University. A sociologist, he has broad interdisciplinary research interests in the social, economic, and political development of the employee share ownership and the profit sharing idea in the United States. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research interests include economic sociology, the social and economic history of the corporation, and public policy. He has studied the relationship between the division of rewards, power, and prestige in organizations and performance using large datasets along with the history and development of public policies on these issues. His books and articles have addressed different systems of work and broad-based employee ownership, profit sharing, and stock options in corporations, countries, industry sectors, (such as Silicon Valley), and historical periods. Blasi has been quoted frequently in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, and Newsweek throughout his career. He received the Lady Davis Fellowship at Hebrew University, the U.S. Government’s Fulbright Fellowship, the Mellon Foundation fellowship of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and also a fellowship award at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Early in his career as a lecturer in social studies at Harvard University, he also served as a legislative assistant in the U.S. House of Representatives. He is Director of the Fellowship Program at Rutgers University's School of Management and Labor Relations that supports young and emerging scholars in the area of employee share ownership and profit sharing nationally. He is the author of many books and journal articles on these topics including The Citizen's Share (Yale University Press, forthcoming 2014) with Richard Freeman and Douglas Kruse, Shared Capitalism at Work (University of Chicago Press, 2010)with Douglas Kruse and Richard Freeman, In The Company of Owners (Basic Books, 2003) with Douglas Kruse and Aaron Bernstein, Kremlin Capitalism (Cornell University Press, 1996) with Douglas Kruse and Maya Kroumova, The New Owners (HarperCollins, 1991) with Douglas Kruse, and Employee Ownership (HarperCollins, 1988).

He joined IZA as a Research Fellow in April 2013.