Do Acquaintances and Friends Make Us Learn? Social Capital and Lifelong Learning in Germany

<p>NEUJOBS Working Paper No. 4.3.4</p> <p>Abstract:<br>This paper examines whether social capital has an impact on adult learning. We test empirically the effects of various types of social capital according to different prominent sociological theories or other previous findings - using the German Socioeconomic Panel. We address endogeneity issues by using predetermined variables, panel data and instrumental variable methods. Controlling for relevant background variables we find that most of our social capital measures have a significant and positive impact on the probabilities for investing in various types of adult learning. The size of the effect varies across the different measures between increasing the probability of participating in adult learning by 0.04% to increasing the probability by 17%. We find evidence that Granovetter’s (1973) theory of weak and strong ties can be applied to the context of adult learning.</p> <p>