Social Networks among the Long-term Unemployed and Regaining Employment

This paper examines whether the social net- works of unemployed people have a positive impact on their re-employment chances. Hypotheses derived from the literature are concerned with different aspects of the network. We hypothesize that having more (both strong and weak) social ties, more employed friends and more resources in their network, all lead to higher chances of employment. We use data from the Panel Study "Labor Market and Social Security" (Panel "Arbeitsmarkt und soziale Sicherung"), where comprehensive information on the networks of the unemployed networks is available. We use fixed-effects regression to control for observed time-variant and unobserved time-invariant confounders. We find that weak ties, namely active memberships in voluntary organizations, as well as network resources that are not directly related to job searches are statistically significantly impacting re-employment. This contribution ends with a discussion of the implications of these findings.