Do job-seekers benefit from contacts? : a direct test

While it is intuitively plausible that using contacts in job search benefits a job-seeker, there is still both theoretical disagreement and inconclusive empirical evidence on why a job-seeker's social capital is associated with her labor-market outcomes (for reviews, see Mouw 2003, 2006). We take an important step toward identifying the source of this association by proposing a direct test for whether or not a job-seeker benefits from using her social networks. This direct test holds an important advantage over an indirect test proposed by Mouw (2003). By using a within-individual fixed-effects methodology, the direct test rules out most sources of between-individual heterogeneity (Yakubovich 2005). Therefore, its results are not influenced by the quality of the measures used to assess a job-seeker's social capital. Using unique data on university graduates' successful and unsuccessful job-searches, we show that, for job-seekers who use contacts to search for jobs, that method leads to better labor-market outcomes than formal methods do. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for the literature on job search and social networks.

Department dc:contributor.department

Sloan School of Management.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2012

Author dc:creator

• Lan, George

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Elena Obukhova.

• Sloan School of Management.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/77876

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/77876