Shinan Wang

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

I study what makes human capital valuable and how technology and social context shape whom firms hire, promote, and invest in as that value changes.

My job market paper shows that major new technologies can reset career hierarchies. After firms adopt a new technological regime, experience built under the prior regime loses its advantage, while general experience remains valuable. Frontier work initially draws relatively junior workers, an opening that narrows as the new regime matures. I call this a mobility window: a temporary period in which frontier opportunities reach beyond established hierarchies. I find this pattern in firms’ adoption of AI today and across technological transitions over the past half century.

My broader research examines how technological change reshapes work, the expertise firms need, and the hiring requirements they set, and how social capital, family institutions, and national identity shape how firms evaluate and organize talent across countries and within multinational firms. These forces intersect when social networks shape which technologies firms pursue and where they build expertise for innovation.

My work combines large-scale data and computational methods with historical archives I digitize and assemble, online experiments, and qualitative interviews. My research has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

I am on the 2026–2027 academic job market.