Using Your Ties to Get a Job in Bogota? the Effects of Social Networks on Quality of Employment

This paper examines the impact of social networks through the use of family, friends or relatives ties on quality of employment (QoE). We suggest that the ambiguous findings in the existent literature may be due in part to the heterogeneity of structures and contents of social networks and in part to an overly restricted measure of quality of employment. Drawing from the socioeconomic literature on social networks and labour market, we propose:  (i) an original and multidimensional measure of the quality of employment, (ii) a fruitful estimation approach (finite mixture models) of the effect of social networks on QoE that allows to deal with complex inter-groups heterogeneity. Our empirical investigation is based on data from a sample of Bogota’s workers in the Great Integrated Household Survey (GIHS) in 2013. We find evidence proving that the use of ties have a significant and negative effect for individuals who are in the lower quality of employment range. Inversely, the use of social networks has a non-significant effect for individuals who are in the better quality of employment range. These results suggest the existence of a stratification and different social realities for Bogota´s workers, verifying that the effect of social networks differ between the employment situation. Our findings raise questions about the difference prevailing between necessity social networks for the precarious workers and opportunity networks or connivance networks for protected workers.