Bio & C.V.

Wenchen Wang is an Industry Assistant Professor of Business Economics at Illinois Institute of Technology’s Stuart School of Business and a Research Affiliate at West Virginia University’s Knee Regulatory Research Center. She earned her Ph.D. in Public Affairs, with a minor in Applied and Labor Economics, from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Before joining Illinois Tech, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s School of Labor and Employment Relations.

Her research lies at the intersection of labor economics, public policy, and applied microeconomics. She studies how labor-market institutions and government regulations shape workers’ economic opportunities and well-being, with particular interests in occupational licensing, multidimensional job quality, and wage inequality. Her work combines applied econometric methods with large-scale administrative, survey, and regulatory data to examine not only what workers earn, but also the security, autonomy, benefits, advancement opportunities, and sense of meaning they experience at work.

Wenchen’s research has been published in various journals. Her study of occupational licensing in the public sector examines how licensing affects wages and employment differently across public- and private-sector workers. Her research on job quality advances a multidimensional understanding of good work by identifying the workplace conditions that matter most to employees. Her current projects examine occupational licensing and job quality, the measurement of licensing stringency, and the development of a new latent index of job quality. Together, these projects contribute new data and empirical evidence to debates about labor-market regulation, inequality, and worker well-being.

Her professional experience extends beyond academia. She has worked as a Summer Research Fellow with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Chief Evaluation Office, a data and policy analyst with the Minnesota Department of Human Services, and a consultant or analyst for organizations including the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Hennepin County, and the Volcker Alliance. These experiences inform her commitment to producing research that is methodologically rigorous, policy relevant, and accessible to practitioners and the public.

At Illinois Tech, Wenchen teaches undergraduate economics and graduate public administration courses, including econometrics, microeconomics, macroeconomics, policy forecasting and analysis, and program evaluation. She incorporates experiential learning and community-engaged research into her teaching, guiding students as they apply analytical tools to real policy and organizational challenges. She is also active in the broader profession through conference leadership, doctoral advising, and peer review for journals.