The Impacts of Social Networks on Immigrants’ Employment Prospects: The Spanish Case 1997-2007

• Luciana Méndez Errico ^[1]
  1. [1] Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

     Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

     Barcelona, España

     
• Localización: Working papers (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament d'Economia Aplicada), Nº. 1, 2013
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
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• Resumen

  • This paper studies the extent to which social networks influencethe employment stability and wagesofimmigrantsin Spain. By doing so, I consider an aspect that has not been previously addressed in the empirical literature, namely the connection between immigrants’ social networks and labor market outcomes in Spain. For this purpose, I use micro-data from the National Immigrant Survey carried out in2007. The analysis is conducted in two stages. First, the impact of social networks on the probability of keeping the first job obtained in Spain is studied through a multinomial logit regression. Second, quantile regressionsareused toestimatea wage equation. The empirical results suggest that once the endogeneity problem has been accounted for, immigrants’ social networks influence their labor market outcomes. Onarrival, immigrants experience a mismatch in the labor market. In addition, different effects of social networks on wages by genderand wage distribution are found. While contacts onarrival and informal job access mechanisms positively influence women’swages, a wage penalty is observed for men.