Does It Pay to Volunteer? The Relationship Between Volunteer Work and Paid Work

Helene Jorgensen

CEPR Reports and Issue Briefs from Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR)

Abstract: It is widely believed that volunteering will improve workers’ job prospects. The logic is that volunteering offers opportunities to expand work-related experience, develop new skills, and build a network of professional contacts. For young people with little history of paid employment it can also signal that a person would be a reliable and motivated employee. In spite of these widespread views about volunteering, surprisingly little research has been done on the effect of volunteering on employment and pay in the United States. This analysis examines volunteering as a pathway to employment during a period of high unemployment, when it is reasonable to expect the beneficial effects of volunteering to be especially pronounced.

Keywords: volunteering; jobs; employment; unemployment; economy; volunteer; job prospects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J J2 J6 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 14 pages
Date: 2013-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme, nep-hrm, nep-lab and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/volunteer-2013-06.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:epo:papers:2013-10

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Reports and Issue Briefs from Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().