Bojanovsky Research Award for Jing Shen, Ph.D.

MZES researcher Jing Shen has been granted this year's research award of the Prof. Dr. Anna und Prof. Dr. Jörg Jiri Bojanovsky Foundation. The Bojanovsky foundation supports the empirical research of young scientists in the field of social, inter-individual, or cultural processes.

Sociologist Jing Shen has received the award for her article "The Causal Effect of Social Capital on Income: A New Analytic Strategy" (see link below). The study has been published in the journal "Social Networks" and identifies three groups of job seekers in terms of the channels used to search for jobs: the formal channel involving only official procedures to obtain a job, the informal channel using only social contacts to obtain a job, and the joint channel leveraging both social contacts and official procedures. The results show that joint channel users not only make more job search attempts but also obtain higher income than formal channel users. Meanwhile, joint channel users, because of their relative advantages in both human capital and social capital, not only make more job attempts but also obtain higher income than informal channel users.

The award ceremony took place June 28, 2018 at the annual celebration of the Mannheim School of Social Sciences. The prize money is € 1,000.

(July 4, 2018)