Updated: September 2nd, 2026
I moved from HBS to Kellogg last summer. Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about how innovation reshapes work and economic opportunity. During my seven years at HBS, I mostly studied job design and the future of work, with a particular focus on inequality: how firms structure jobs, how managerial roles change, and how new work arrangements affect inequality inside organizations. That line of work was what got me tenure (see my tenure statement here).
My new work grows out of that earlier agenda, but it also moves in a few new directions. I am now more focused on innovation itself, including new technologies and new forms of knowledge. I am also more interested in long-run consequences, which is why many of my current projects use historical settings. And I am trying to write for a broader audience, including not only sociologists and management scholars, but also economists.
Across these projects, I rely heavily on new computational tools. I use large language models, computer vision, and record-linkage methods to extract text and structured information from business directories, yearbooks, newspapers, and occupational records; link people and organizations across sources; and measure changes in work, technology, and organizational life over long periods of time. I also include a short note summarizing some practical lessons I have learned from using recent AI models for historical text extraction.
Here are examples of the type of work that I’ve been doing recently.
The Rise of Mass Production and the Decline of Women’s Entrepreneurship
(with Yoon Jae Shin)
This paper shows how the rise of mass retailing reshaped women’s entrepreneurship at the turn of the 20th century. Using newly assembled historical data on business ownership, we show that the spread of ready-to-wear clothing contributed substantially to the decline of the needle trades, long an important path into entrepreneurship for women. Following ready-to-wear entry, younger women became less likely to enter these trades and more likely to take wage jobs in retail. Women also had far less access to ownership and leadership in the new retail and apparel organizations that emerged. These findings show how the rise of mass production and large-scale retail shifted women from business ownership toward employment in larger organizations.
The Impact of Technological Innovation on Entrepreneurship
This paper studies how technological innovation shapes entrepreneurship. We assemble a large-scale dataset of U.S. businesses from 1870 to the present and trace the commercialization of more than 100 technologies. Early entrepreneurs tend to be younger, come from more advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds, and build businesses that survive longer and receive higher evaluations. These differences appear to reflect human capital advantages that help early entrants recognize and exploit new technological opportunities. As technologies mature, these advantages diminish.
Codifying Expertise: Paper Patterns and Women’s Entry into Dressmaking
(with Yoon Jae Shin)
This paper studies how the codification of knowledge affects occupational entry and entrepreneurship. We examine the diffusion of commercial paper dress patterns across U.S. cities between 1863 and 1890. By encoding parts of garment construction into standardized templates, patterns made dressmaking knowledge easier to acquire. We find little evidence that patterns displaced incumbent dressmakers. Instead, they increased entry into dressmaking, especially among younger and literate seamstresses, and increased the number of women operating dressmaking businesses. The findings show how technologies that codify expertise can lower barriers to skilled work and expand access to entrepreneurship.
Replication materials for recently published papers
Wang, Shinan, Letian Zhang, and Zhenyu Liao "Remote Work and Hiring Requirements: Cross-Country Evidence from Job Postings." Administrative Science Quarterly: Forthcoming. Link Replication Code
Zhang, Letian and Simeng Wang "The Value of Internal Labor Markets: Evidence from LinkedIn Profiles and U.S. Inventors." American Journal of Sociology: Forthcoming. Link Replication Code
Hosseinioun, Moh, Frank Neffke, Letian Zhang, and Hyejin Youn. (2024). "Skill Dependencies Uncover Nested Human Capital." Nature Human Behavior: 9(4), p.673. Link Replication Code Online Appendices
Zhang, Letian and Shinan Wang (2024) "Trusting Talent: Cross-Country Differences in Hiring." Administrative Science Quarterly: 69, no.2 : 417-457. Link Replication Code Online Appendices
Zhang, Letian (2023). "The Changing Role of Managers." American Journal of Sociology: 129, no.2 : 439-484. Link Replication Code
Zhang, Letian, Mitali Banerjee, Shinan Wang, and Zhuoqiao Hong (2023). “The Fragility of Artists’ Reputations from 1795 to 2020.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: 120(35). Link Replication Code Online Appendices
Wilmers, Nathan and Letian Zhang (2022). "Values and Inequality: How Prosocial Pay Discounts Offset the College Pay Premium." American Sociological Review: 87(3), 415–442. Link Replication Code