Christina Brown is PhD Candidate in Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously Christina worked as a consultant for the World Bank and Save the Children.
In South Asia, three quarters of ultra-poor households report casual labour as the dominant form of income. In urban areas, short-term construction jobs are found through social connections or by going to a “labour stand”, essentially an intersection where low-skilled labourers wait each morning for employers looking to hire for a day or two.
In this pilot study, we demonstrate that low-skilled day labourers who are socially connected to their employers have significantly higher chances of securing jobs, irrespective of having lower productivity than their lesser connected counterparts in Pakistan.