TY  - JOUR
AU  - Goel,Deepti
AU  - Lang,Kevin
TI  - Social Ties and the Job Search of Recent Immigrants
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 15186
PY  - 2009
Y2  - July 2009
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15186
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15186.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Deepti Goel
Department of Economics
Delhi School of Economics
University of Delhi
Delhi 110007, India
E-Mail: dgoel.india@gmail.com

Kevin Lang
Department of Economics
Boston University
270 Bay State Road
Boston, MA  02215
Tel: 617/353-5694
Fax: 617/353-4001
E-Mail: lang@bu.edu
AB  - 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.
ER  -