Social capital and immigrants' labour market performance.

This paper analyses the role of social capital on immigrants' labour market outcomes. We use principal component analysis ( PCA) to build an index of social networks and explore its impact on the probability of getting a job and on wage levels using the Households Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia ( HILDA) longitudinal survey data (2002-2010). We find a positive effect of social capital on migrants' employment outcomes and wages, especially for women. Distinguishing employment into blue and white-collar jobs, we find that social capital only affects the probability of getting a white-collar job. These results suggest that promoting opportunities to create social capital has a beneficial effect on migrants' integration in the host country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]