Welcome!

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan.

I am a quantitative sociologist with research interests in social stratification & mobility, gender, and spatial demography. My research focuses on how labor market contexts, families, and educational institutions structure social outcomes across groups and places. A primary line of my research concerns geographic stratification of opportunities and long-distance spatial mobility. In my dissertation, I investigate links between local labor market structures, family demographic changes, and patterns of migration, and I show that these spatial mobility patterns lead to gender inequality in earnings. I also engage in collaborative projects on educational and housing contexts in metropolitan areas, gendered consequences of migration in comparative settings, and the health consequences of spatial mobility.

In addition to this work, I have published research on gender inequality, including analyses of occupational and educational gender segregation. My research on social mobility more broadly examines education’s role in mobility processes and develops approaches that predict social mobility outcomes.

At the Stone Center, I work with Pablo Mitnik and Tali Krystal (University of Haifa) on a project examining workplace income distribution by social class. Across my work, I use a range of quantitative and computational methods, including complex regression and decomposition techniques, causal inference approaches, and machine learning, and I draw on survey data, administrative records, and large scale commercial datasets.

My research has been published and is forthcoming in Demography, Sociological Methods & Research, Sociological Science, and Chinese Journal of Sociology. My work has received several awards, including an ASA Sociology of Population Student Paper Award Honorable Mention, the Kerckhoff Award from the Research Committee 28 on Social Stratification and Mobility (RC28), and best graduate student paper awards from Cornell University and New York University (NYU). My CV is available here.

I hold a PhD in Sociology from Cornell University, with a minor in Demography. I obtained a master’s degree in Applied Quantitative Research from NYU, and a bachelor’s degree in English and Literature from Beijing Foreign Studies University.

You can reach me at zhenghw@umich.edu.