About
I am an assistant professor in the Organizational Behaviour and Human Resources Division of the University of British Columbia's Sauder School of Business.
My research focuses on the organization of work, with core components including the content of jobs (skill demands, task composition), the division and valuation of work, labor management strategies, worker voice and representation, and informal social relations in workplaces. I document and explain the formation, variation, and change in work organization as shaped by factors such as manager political values, public policies, and platform algorithmic environments. I also examine the implications of work organization for firm behavior and labor market outcomes, such as pay-setting and wage inequality.
Methodologically, my research primarily uses computational methods and causal inference techniques applied to large-scale sources of digital trace. These sources include job postings, workplace reviews, and LinkedIn worker profiles. I complement these approaches with surveys, qualitative text analyses, and interviews.
I hold a PhD in Management from MIT Sloan (affiliated with the Institute for Work and Employment Research), an M.A. in Computational Social Science from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in English from Tsinghua University.
Working Paper
Manager Political Values and Gendered Work Organization
Abstract (click to expand): What determines the content of work and who performs it? Market-centric theories emphasize production needs and skill matching, but overlook the influence of cultural beliefs about gender. Prior research on this influence focuses on gender sorting across female-typed and male-typed occupations. However, the actual design and allocation of job tasks occurs within firms, driven by managers whose beliefs about gender vary — beliefs systematically aligned with political leaning. This paper examines how task content and allocation differ across managers’ political affiliations in the United States. Using millions of LinkedIn worker task reports, contextual word embeddings, and voter registration records, I show firms differ markedly in how they organize work along gendered lines in two key ways. First, firms with a higher proportion of Democrat managers have more female-typed tasks—even when comparing similar firms in the same regions, industries, and jobs. Specifically, these firms emphasize more customer and program service work, and less technical and maintenance work than their Republican-led competitors. Second, task allocation departs more from gender stereotypes in Democrat-led firms with an unconventional desegregation pathway: men perform relatively fewer stereotypically masculine tasks. To address concerns about unobserved confounders and self-presentation bias, I employ a firm-occupation fixed effect model, a worker fixed effect model on firm switchers, and an occupation-constant measure from O*NET data. The findings show that managerial political leaning shape how gender beliefs are embedded in the internal organization of work—an arena often assumed to be apolitical and gender-neutral—with potential implications for both gender equity and organizational performance.
Firm Response to Regulatory Costs: Do Minimum Wage Mandates Affect Work Management Practices?
Revise and Resubmit at Management Science
Abstract (click to expand): Firms often respond to costly regulations through evasion, noncompliance, or symbolic compliance. When these strategies are infeasible, do they adjust closely related but unregulated practices to offset regulatory costs? This study examines whether state-mandated minimum wage increases drive firms to modify work management practices as a means to offset regulatory costs, either by reducing nonwage labor expenses or improving worker productivity. I use U.S. employee job reviews to measure management quality across states, firms, and occupations over time in three areas: schedule quality, investment in employees (training, career development, and relational investment), and employee input (autonomy and voice). Drawing on theories of compensating differentials, high-road strategy, and organizational inertia, I test competing hypotheses using difference-indifferences analyses. The results show that as firms comply with wage mandates, they, on average, neither compromise job quality in non-wage aspects nor thoroughly upgrade management systems in the high-road direction. These findings underscore organizational inertia despite economic pressure to offset regulatory costs, revealing a decoupled relationship between wage-setting and non-wage work management design.
Publication
(with Lingfei Wu and James Evans)
Nature Communications (2025)
Abstract (click to expand): Substantial scholarship has estimated the susceptibility of jobs to automation, but little has examined how job contents evolve in the information age as new technologies substitute for tasks, shifting required skills rather than eliminating entire jobs. Here we explore patterns of occupational skill change and characterize occupations and workers subject to the greatest re-skilling requirements in the United States. Recent work found that changing skill requirements are greatest for STEM occupations in the 2010s. Nevertheless, analyzing 167 million online job posts covering 721 occupations, we find that when accounting for distance between skills, skill change is greater for lower-skilled occupations: those with fewer skills, lower wages, and less educational requirements. We further investigate the differences in skill change across employer and market size, as well as social demographic groups. We find that jobs from small employers and markets experienced larger skill upgrades to catch up with the skill demands of their large employers and markets. While these varied skill changes could create uneven reskilling pressures across workers, they may also lead to a narrowing of gaps in job quality and prospects. We conclude by showcasing our model’s potential to chart job evolution directions using skill embedding spaces.
(with Nathan Wilmers and Victoria Zhang)
American Journal of Sociology 130, no.5 (2025): 1217-1262.
Abstract (click to expand): Employer investment, social closure, peer networks: substantial research highlights differences in informal social structure across workplaces. Yet studies of pay inequality between firms have largely neglected these differences in favor of more easily measurable features like firm size or ownership structure. We show how three types of workplace social relations shape firm pay setting: employer relational investment that supports higher wages, social closure as a source of bargaining power, and amenity ties that lock workers into jobs despite low pay. To operationalize these concepts, we draw on text data from a large archive of job reviews. Variance decomposition analyses show that differences in social relations account for up to 20% of overall inequality in between-firm pay premiums and 7% of residual inequality. Differences in informal social organization, and not just formal organization, predict pay differences between firms.
(with Thomas A. Kochan, Janice R. Fine, Kate Bronfenbrenner, Suresh Naidu, Jacob Barnes, Yaminette Diaz-Linhart, John Kallas, Jeonghun Kim, Arrow Minster, Phela Townsend, and Danielle Twiss)
Work and Occupations 50, no. 3 (2023): 335-350.
Abstract (click to expand): American workers are currently engaged in an upsurge in collective actions aimed at achieving a stronger voice and representation at work; this desire for increased voice at work is also evident in survey data. However, union organizing drives in the United States typically meet with strong employer resistance, and such resistance reduces the likelihood that the organizing effort will be successful. In addition to unions, a broad array of other efforts has been initiated to strengthen worker voice and representation. The authors discuss these efforts, including worker centers, and observe that there is no “one size fits all” approach to contemporary worker organizing.
Full Report Version
Selected Work in Progress
Work Tasks and Career Mobility
United In Numbers: How Fans Become Data Workers
(with Chen Liang)
Teaching
MIT Kaufman Teaching Certification Program (2024 Spring)
TA for MIT Sloan’s 15.665 Power and Negotiation (2023 Spring), 15.268 Choice Points: Thinking about Life and Leadership through Literature (2025 Spring, 2026 Spring)
