Job Market Candidates, Fall 2024

Nan Feng

Nan Feng is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology. She studies social networks and social inequality. Her work employs innovative quantitative approaches to study complex data structures in interdisciplinary areas. She has three lines of interrelated research. The first line is on social capital and how it interacts with social inequality. The second line examines the sequential relationship between social disadvantage, network dynamics, and health.The third line examines business networks and the role of geographic distance in their formation and evolution. 

Hyo Joo Lee

Hyo Joo Lee is a family demographer and social inequality scholar in the Department of Sociology. Her research examines disparities in parenting and childcare, and their relationships to gender inequality and work-family policies. Using quantitative methods on a wide range of datasets from both the U.S. and South Korea—including national cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys, administrative records, and web-scraped data—she aims to bridge sociological theories with the empirical world and offer policy insights. Her dissertation investigates how family resources and the varying investments parents make in their children differ, and how these patterns have changed over time. In the first two chapters, she adopts a couple-level perspective to show how families allocate resources to their children in different ways. Shifting focus to the resources available to families, the third chapter documents changes in the availability of childcare centers following fertility decline, using administrative data from South Korea. This project won the Best Poster Award at Population Association of America 2024 Annual Meeting.

Guilia Olivero

Giulia Olivero is an applied microeconomist and PhD candidate in the Brooks School of Public Policy whose research focuses on gender, family and immigration. Her job market paper looks at the effect of the gender pay gap on employment penalties for mothers in the US. She is also interested in gender norms and how exposure to parental and neighborhood role models during adolescence affects long-term labor market outcomes for women. 

Yongxin Shang

Yongxin Shang is a PhD candidate in Public Policy at Cornell University, with a concentration in Sociology and a minor in Demography. With an interdisciplinary training background, she is broadly interested in family, health, inequalities, and policymaking in aging societies. Her dissertation aims to understand who is caring for older adults and how diverse care arrangements influence the well-being of older adults and their caregivers. Her previous research has been published in prestigious journals in family science and aging research, including the Journal of Marriage and Family and the Journals of Gerontology, Series B. Beyond research, Yongxin is also passionate about promoting inclusive teaching and mentoring and has been recognized as an Outstanding Teaching Assistant by the Brooks School of Public Policy.

Jenna Shelton

Jenna Shelton is a PhD candidate at Cornell University’s Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy whose research spans the topics of public policy, child welfare, and poverty and inequality.  They study how involvement with multiple institutions—including child welfare, criminal justice, education, and health systems—influences family and child wellbeing. Their research investigates how multi-system involvement: 1) exacerbates inequality across the life course especially for marginalized populations, 2) creates unintended gaps in policy, and 3) shapes the effectiveness of social services. They use quantitative and qualitative methods to examine how multi-institutional involvement influences wellbeing for children in poverty and how policy levers can foster positive relational processes between children and adults.  Their dissertation uses demographic, econometric, and qualitative approaches to examine how under-represented youth in foster care (i.e., siblings raising siblings) are impacted by social services and kinship care policies.

Meredith Welch

Meredith Welch is an applied microeconomist and PhD candidate in the Brooks School of Public Policy. Her research focuses on three main threads: the effect of student loan debt on individuals’ labor market outcomes, financial health, and overall well-being; the interaction of higher education policy with social safety net programs; and understanding the causes and consequences of race and gender disparities in the labor market. Her job market paper uses consumer credit panel data to examine the drivers and consequences of student loan delinquency and default.

Haowen Zheng

Haowen Zheng is a quantitative sociologist with research interests in gender, social stratification & mobility, and spatial demography. Much of her research on gender inequality uses demographic concepts and methods to examine the sources of disparities in women and men’s occupations and pay, focusing on how these labor market outcomes are affected by dynamics in the family and the education system. She also examines factors that affect spatial and social mobility, such as the impact of local labor markets on internal migration, and the influence of education and family background on income and career outcomes. By integrating these themes, her work aims to uncover the social processes driving inequality and social mobility across generations and the life course. You can check out her personal website for her specific research projects. Her research has been published in Demography and Chinese Journal of Sociology.