Social Ties and the Job Search of Recent Immigrants / Deepti Goel, Kevin Lang.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Goel, Deepti.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Lang, Kevin.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w15186.

NBER working paper series no. w15186

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2009.

Summary:

We show that increasing the probability of obtaining a job offer through a network should raise the observed wages of workers in jobs found through formal channels relative to those in jobs found through the network. This prediction holds at all percentiles except the highest and lowest. The largest changes are likely to occur below the median of the offer distribution. We test and confirm these implications using a survey of recent immigrants into Canada. We develop a simple structural model consistent with the theoretical model and show that it can replicate the broad patterns in the data. Our results are consistent with the primary effect of network strength being to increase the arrival rate of offers rather than to alter the distribution from which offers are drawn at least among recent immigrants.

Notes:

Print version record

July 2009.