Strong versus Weak Ties in Migration
Corrado Giulietti,
Jackline Wahba and
Yves Zenou
No 8089, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
Abstract:
This paper studies the role of strong versus weak ties in the rural-to-urban migration decision in China. We first develop a network model that puts forward the different roles of weak and strong ties in helping workers to migrate to the city. We then use a unique longitudinal data that allows us to test our model by focusing on first-time migration. Strong ties are measured by the closest family contact, while weak ties are determined by the fraction of migrants from the village in which the individual resides. We address the endogeneity of the network formation in the migration decision. Our results indicate that both weak and strong ties matter in the migration decision process, although the impact of weak ties is higher than that of strong ties. We also show that one underestimates the effect of social networks on migration by not taking into account the strong ties in the mobility process. We finally find that weak and strong ties act as complements in the migration decision, which indicates that the interactive effect between weak and strong ties is particularly strong above a certain threshold of the size of weak ties.
Keywords: internal migration; social networks; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J61 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2014-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab, nep-mig, nep-soc, nep-tra and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)
Published - published in: European Economic Review, 2018, 104, 111 - 137
Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp8089.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: Strong versus weak ties in migration (2018) 
Working Paper: Strong versus Weak Ties in Migration (2014) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp8089
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().