Impacts of social networks on floating population wages under different marketization levels: empirical analysis of China’s 2016 national floating population dynamic monitoring data

This paper establishes a measurement model to examine the impacts of social network heterogeneity on the wages of the floating population, and the different impacts under different levels of marketization. The main findings are: (1) Social network heterogeneity can increase the wages of the floating population, which is particularly significant for urban-urban migrants with non-agricultural registration; (2) The effect of social network heterogeneity on the wages of the floating population is due to the different levels of marketization of the destination market of inflows. The levels of marketization vary from place to place: in cities with low marketization levels, the homogeneous social networks can increase the wages more than the heterogeneous social networks. With marketization levels increase, social networks can increase the employment wages of migrants through three stages: the stage of the homogeneous social network is stronger than heterogeneous social network; the stage of no significant difference between homogeneous social network and heterogeneous social network; the stage of heterogeneous social network is stronger than homogeneous social network. In general, for the wages of rural-urban migrants with agricultural hukou, homogeneous social networks and marketization levels have a substitutional relationship, while heterogeneous social networks and marketization levels have a complementary relationship.