The impact of job contact networks on wages of rural-urban migrants in China: a switching regression approach

Abstract

In nationally representative household data from the 2008 Chinese Rural to Urban Migration Survey, nearly two thirds of rural–urban migrants found their employment through family members, relatives, friends or acquaintances. This paper investigates why the use of social network to find jobs is so prevalent among rural–urban migrants in China, and whether migrants face a wage penalty as a result of adopting this job search method. This is an output from the ‘Local government, economic growth and human development: Chinese lessons for Kenya and Uganda?’ project led by the University of Nottingham