Qingfang Wang is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of California Riverside. Before moving to the west coast, she had been working at University of North Carolina Charlotte for ten year and U.S. South has been her adopted home for 15 years! With a particular focus on racial/ethnic minority, immigrants, and women, her research interests lie in the area of urban economics and development of communities. Her interdisciplinary approach integrates individual workforce development into community building, neighborhood revitalization, and regional development. One of her research areas has focused on the issues of racial/ethnic and gender division of labor in U.S. cities. It addresses how place, as both work site and residential location, interacts with race, ethnicity, immigration status, and gender in forging labor market concentration and segmentation patterns.
She is particularly intrigued by the hierarchical nature of labor market processes through the lens of entrepreneurship. Funded by the NSF and the Kauffman Foundation, she has conducted multiple research projects on ethnic, immigrant and female entrepreneurship in the U.S. cities. Using a set of privileged confidential data at the Center of Economic Studies, the U.S. Census Bureau, her studies have assessed the spatial dimensions of entrepreneurship at varying scales to explain how place, race/ethnicity, and gender interact in entrepreneurial processes.
As existing entrepreneurship studies have mainly focused on high-tech industries, her research challenges traditional views on entrepreneurship and practices of community development through examining the diversity and fluidity of entrepreneurial process. She seeks to examine the possibility to empower disadvantaged groups and enhance the innovative potential of minority entrepreneurs as the fundamental engine of capacity building and economic growth. Currently, working with many universities across the U.S. she is conducting a research project on business development in underserved communities.
