Providing equal opportunities to all members of society independent of an individual's socioeconomic background is a major objective of German policy makers. However, evidence on the access to education suggests that opportunities of children with a non-academic family background are still...

In this paper, the search model is proposed, in which homogeneous firms are uncertain about the job seekers' number of friends, who can help them in the job search (social capital). All workers have the same productivity and differ only in the social capital. A firm offers a take-it-or-leave-it...

We analyze the impact of adolescents' friendship relations in their final-year class of highschool on subsequent labor market success. Based on a typology of network positions we locateeach student within the social system of the school class as either: an isolate, a sycophant,a broker or a...

This paper develops a search model with heterogeneous workers and social networks. High ability workers are more productive and have a larger number of professional contacts. Firms have a choice between a high cost vacancy in the regular labour market and a low cost job opening in the referral...

We make use of predicted social and civic activities (social capital) to account for selection into "social" occupations. Individual selection accounts for more than the total difference in wages observed between social and nonsocial occupations. The role that individual social capital plays in...