Social Networks Effect And It's Boundary:A Study Based On Job-Worker Matching

To explore the degree and boundary of social networks effect in labor market are facing two big challenges,one is the endogeneity problem in causality,and the second is the structural variation of causal effect.Among them,the first challenge is more fundamental.If the first one is confirmed,it means social networks have no real effect on the results of labor market,so the empirical foundations of social networks perspective are not reliable,and then the whole theoretical system established on those empirical foundations will be questionable.This dissertation focuses on the two big challenges,and tries to solve them through theoretical analysis and empirical tests.First,this paper proposes a new theoretical thought to solve the endogeneity problem,then take the job-worker matching as the dependent variable,and summary and combs existing researches about job-worker matching in education economics and other disciplines,and then exhibit the job-worker matching situations in different countries.Based on those works,according to the labor supply and demand status,hypotheses for checking the social networks‘ information mechanism and favor mechanism are reasoned out.After verifying that social networks do have effects on labor market results,I further investigate how those effects varying between different institutions and different countries.Using Chinese eight cities survey data(JSNET2009)and Australian Survey of Social Attitudes(Au SSA2007),through propensity score matching method,entropy balancing method and modified two step entropy balancing method,hypotheses are tested.Based on the empirical findings,this paper gets four main conclusions:(1)social networks have causal effects on labor market;(2)the information mechanism has no effect on under-qualified matching while the favor mechanism has significant effect on under-qualified matching;(3)under different property rights arrangements,the effects of favor on job-worker matching are different,which is insignificant in private units but significant in public units;(4)in Australian labor market,the influence status is almost the same as in China.According to all of the theoretical thoughts,statistic models and empirical findings,the four main innovations from this dissertation are as follows:(1)a new theoretical method idea for solving endogeneity problem is proposed;(2)in the interpretation of the mechanism,I find that there are two different ways for resource allocation efficiency from job-worker matching,which are used substantially in testing the causality between social networks and labor market results;(3)in terms of statistic method,the modified two step entropy balancing method is a good reference for simultaneously solving different levels endogeneity problem;(4)in further studying social networks effect boundary,comparisons among different institutions and nations are achieved.