Social Capital and Employment Prospects of the Korean Elderly: Silver Lining in an Aging Society?

Social capital and its dimensions – trust, networks and social engagements – are often discussed in relation to individuals’ health and subjective wellbeing, but less frequently in relation to employment prospects, particularly in individuals’ late-career years. With a premise that social capital and its components are individual-level assets in which individuals purposely and methodically invest, we estimate elderly individuals’ stock of social capital using the Bayesian approach as a function of their trust in social institutions, social networks and social engagement. Using all up-to-date waves of the Korean Longitudinal Study of Ageing (2006–2020), we describe the distribution of social capital stock across genders, age cohorts and years. We then assess the value of social capital for individuals’ prospects of attaining full-time regular employment, part-time or irregular employment or self-employment, as well as economic, health and life satisfaction more broadly. We find that, for men, the most effective social capital type for attaining higher quality jobs or self-employment is the frequency of active socializing, while club membership is more conducive to precarious or part-time wage work. For women, all three pillars of social capital – social engagement, networks and trust – are conducive to self-employment, and detracting from wage employment. These findings point to a divergence in the effects of socializing on wage work and self-employment between the two genders.