Social networks and the wages of job seekers: the case of China

This research empirically explores whether the intensity of social networks affects the wages of workers or not using survey data from the Chinese households’ income project in 2002. After controlling for gender, work experience, political affiliation, marital status, years of education and other factors, we show that the social networks are useful for the job hunter to find jobs, but they have little contributions to higher wages. Further studies indicate that the social networks with “strong ties” for job seekers are not conducive to enhancing the wages of workers. However, the social networks with “weak ties” have a lower job hunting probability and heterogeneity benefit for improving wage levels. Furthermore, we employ family dynamic survey data from China in 2006 to make robustness check, and results are still robust. © 2018, Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature.