CSAAW lecture: Social Networks, Segregation, and Labor Market Inequality March 3, 2004

Troy Tassier
[Fordham University, Department of Economics and The International Political Economy and Development (IPED) Program]

Abstract: Social networks play an important role in the transmission of job information. Approximately 50 percent of workers in the United States learn of their jobs through friends, relatives, and other social contacts (Granovetter 95). I will discuss the effects of social network structure on income inequality and workplace segregation. At the individual level job seekers prefer uniformly random networks that increase the range of their social network (Calvo-Armengol and Jackson 2004). At the group level, however, segregated networks with a non-random structure can outperform uniformly random networks for the purpose of acquiring job information. This result occurs because of the ability of a non-random network to contain job information inside a group.