Abstract
This chapter considers the effects of social networks on the income and employment dynamics of rural–urban migrants in Vietnam. Estimation of a causal effect is challenging because unobserved factors affect both employment performance and social networks. I address this endogeneity problem by using the instrumental variable method. The results suggest that social networks improve migrants’ incomes and make wage-earners willing to change their jobs.
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Notes
- 1.
The mean of the log of migrants’ current income is 8.44. The effect is calculated as 0.9/8.44 = 0.106 or 10.6% of the mean.
- 2.
The main reason for using OLS rather than other estimators such as logit is that the coefficients estimated by OLS are easier to interpret.
- 3.
On average, there are 12 districts in each province. The area of each district ranges from 27.8 to 3677.4 km2 and the mean is 660 km2. For the period 1975–2006, the data are taken from Thomas et al. (2010).
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Dang, D.A. (2019). Social Networks and Employment Performance: Evidence from Rural–Urban Migration in Vietnam. In: Liu, A., Meng, X. (eds) Rural-Urban Migration in Vietnam. Population Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94574-3_6
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