Shinan Wang

PhD Candidate · Management & Organizations & Sociology
Kellogg School of Management · Northwestern University

I study how labor markets work, including who gets hired, what skills and expertise employers reward, and how technology reshapes careers and opportunity, alongside broader questions about how social structure, such as elite social network, social capital, and kinship, shapes labor markets across countries. My work combines large-scale data and computational methods with historical archives, online experiments, and qualitative interviews.

In my dissertation, I study how successive waves of technological change reshuffle the expertise that firms seek. Each wave opens a mobility window: a new technology resets who counts as an expert. Junior workers who master it can move past their senior peers, and experience no longer guarantees an edge. This reshuffle is lasting. Using patents, job postings, and workers’ career histories from LinkedIn, I trace who gains — and who loses — access to good jobs.