مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد تاثیر علی سرمایه اجتماعی بر درآمد – الزویر 2018

This study identifies three groups of job seekers in terms of the channels used to search for jobs: the formal channel involving only official procedures to obtain a job, the informal channel using only social contacts to obtain a job, and the joint channel leveraging both social contacts and official procedures. The analysis of a national sample survey of China shows that joint channel users, due to their relatively higher level of social capital, not only make more job search attempts but also obtain higher income than formal channel users. Meanwhile, joint channel users, because of their relative advantages in both human capital and social capital, not only make more job attempts but also obtain higher income than informal channel users. The two comparisons offer a new strategy to test the causal role social capital plays in labour market success, regardless of whether social capital is exogenous or endogenous to human capital.

Introduction

Social capital theories have long argued that the use of personal contacts in the search for employment leads to higher wages and higher occupational status. Personal contacts are thought to give access to valuable resources such as information and influence, which lead to better jobs (Granovetter, 1973; Lin, 2001). Although empirical evidence partly confirmed this hypothesized effect of social capital on labour market outcomes (see reviews by Granovetter, 1995; Lin, 1999), questions have been raised about the causality of this effect. Mouw (2003), in particular, argued that social capital may be largely endogenous to human capital, as individuals with higher education have more social capital. In his critique ofthe social capital effect, Mouw (2003)identified two sources of endogeneity. The first is homophily, the tendency of people to socialize with others who are similar to themselves (McPherson and Smith-Lovin, 1987), which implies that the occupational statuses of an individual’s personal contacts are correlated with his/her own status. To address this source of endogeneity, several scholars have proposed and adopted advanced tests (Bian et al., 2015; Chen, 2012; Chen and Volker, 2016; Fernandez and Galperin, 2014; Lin and Ao, 2008; McDonald, 2015), and concluded that even after controlling for this type of endogeneity there is still a significant effect of contactuse onlabourmarket outcomes inbothmarket and nonmarket economies. The second source of endogeneity, however, has largely been overlooked in examinations ofthe role social capital plays in labour markets. This source of endogeneity is associated with reservation wage, a theoretical and unobservable lowest wage a rational worker would be willing to accept so as to complete the job search (Montgomery, 1992). Mouw (2003:870-1) argues that reservation wage is the determinant of job search outcomes, and that causal examinations of job search outcomes should focus on reservation wage, rather than obtained wage. According to Mouw, social capital can be argued as a cause of job search outcomes if and only if contact use contributes to the increase in reservation wage. The problem of endogeneity occurs when one’s social capital is highly correlated with one’s human capital, as the relationship between social capital and reservation wage might be explained by the effect of human capital. Demonstrating a causal relation between social capital and reservation wage is empirically challenging, because reservation wage is not only unobservable, but it also varies with the probability of receiving job offers, as well as the wage accompanying each offer (Montgomery, 1992; Mouw, 2003). At present, none of the existing analytical strategies (see a review by Chen, 2012) has been designed to reveal the causal role of social capital in reservation wage, with the effect of human capital taken into account.