Social welfare and wage inequality in search equilibrium with personal contacts

Anna Zaharieva

No 459, Center for Mathematical Economics Working Papers from Center for Mathematical Economics, Bielefeld University

Abstract: This paper incorporates job search through personal contacts into an equilibrium matching model with a segregated labour market. Job search in the public submarket is competitive which is in contrast with the bargaining nature of wages in the informal job market. Moreover, the social capital of unemployed workers is endogenous depending on the employment status of their contacts. This paper shows that the traditional Hosios (1990) condition continues to hold in an economy with family contacts but it fails to provide efficiency in an economy with weak ties. This inefficiency is explained by a network externality: weak ties yield higher wages in the informal submarket than family contacts. Furthermore, the spillovers between the two submarkets imply that wage premiums associated with personal contacts lead to higher wages paid to unemployed workers with low social capital but the probability to find a job for those workers is below the optimal level.

Keywords: network formation; labour economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37
Date: 2014-04-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-hrm, nep-lab and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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https://pub.uni-bielefeld.de/download/2671705/2671706 First Version, 2011 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Social welfare and wage inequality in search equilibrium with personal contacts (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bie:wpaper:459

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