Wage Effects of Recruitment Methods: The Case of the Italian Social Service Sector

This essay analyzes the role of different recruitment channels, and of informal networks in particular, on wage structures across various organization types in the Italian social service sector. While the impact of recruitment methods on wages has been addressed in several previous contributions, none of them focuses on social services. Comparison of outcomes across organization types within the same sector is in itself another novelty, as compared to previous studies that generally focus on differences across sectors or, more recently, across countries. The main findings are that nonprofit organizations prefer informal recruitment methods to better select the most motivated workers, namely those workers who share the nonprofit mission. Furthermore the impact of informal contacts on the wage structure explains much of the unobserved wage differentials across organization type. © 2009 Physica-Verlag Heidelberg

Do Parental Networks Pay Off? Linking Children's Labor-Market Outcomes to Their Parents' Friends

In this paper, we examine whether children are better off if their parents have more elaborate social networks. Using data on high-school friendships of parents, we analyze whether the number and characteristics of friends affect the labor-market outcomes of children. While parental friendships formed in high school appear long lasting, we find no significant impact on their children's occupational choices and earnings prospects. These results do not change when we account for network endogeneity, network persistency, and network measurement error. Only when children enter the labor market do friends of parents have a marginally significant but small influence on their occupational choice

Comparative expressed-sequence-tag analysis of differential gene expression profiles in PC-12 cells before and after nerve growth factor treatment.

Nerve growth factor-induced differentiation of adrenal chromaffin PC-12 cells to a neuronal phenotype involves alterations in gene expression and represents a model system to study neuronal differentiation. We have used the expressed-sequence-tag approach to identify approximately 600 differentially expressed mRNAs in untreated and nerve growth factor-treated PC-12 cells that encode proteins with diverse structural and biochemical functions. Many of these mRNAs encode proteins belonging to cellular pathways not previously known to be regulated by nerve growth factor. Comparative expressed-sequence-tag analysis provides a basis for surveying global changes in gene-expression patterns in response to biological signals at an unprecedented scale, is a powerful tool for identifying potential interactions between different cellular pathways, and allows the gene-expression profiles of individual genes belonging to a particular pathway to be followed

Segregation in friendship networks

We analyze a network formation model where agents belong to different communities. Both individual benefits and costs depend on direct as well as indirect connections. Benefits of an indirect connection decrease with distance in the network while the cost of a link depends on the type of agents involved. Two individuals from the same community always face a low linking cost while the cost of forming a relationship between two individuals from different communities diminishes with the rate of exposure of each of them to the other community. We find that socialization among the same type of agents can be weak even if the cost of maintaining links within one's own type is very low. Our model also suggests that policies aiming at reducing segregation are socially desirable only if they reduce the within-community cost differential by a sufficiently large amoun