Laura Gee

Who they are

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The paper has three authors: Laura Gee, Jason Jones and Moira Burke. It appeared in the Journal of Labor Economics, volume 35, issue 2, in 2017, 485-518.

Key papers

Gee, L. K., Jones, J., & Burke, M. (2017). Social Networks and Labor Markets: How Strong Ties Relate to Job Finding on Facebook's Social Network. Journal of Labor Economics, 35(2), 485-518.

The authors test Granovetter's view that weak ties are more useful than strong ties for finding jobs, using data on about six million Facebook users. Job help is hard to observe directly, so they use a proxy: people who eventually work with a pre-existing friend. They link that to objective measures of tie strength.

Key ideas

Many weak ties, one strong tie. Most people were helped through one of their many weak ties, which fits the way acquaintances outnumber close friends. A single stronger tie, however, was significantly more valuable at the margin. The authors present this as evidence opposite to Granovetter's prediction.

The design. The study is observational, and its outcome, later working with a friend, stands in for hearing about a job. A randomised test followed in 2022, when Rajkumar and colleagues varied LinkedIn's suggestions and found a peak at moderately weak ties, with results that depended on the measure and the industry.

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