Does It Pay to Care? Prosocial Engagement and Employment Opportunities

Stijn Baert and Sunčica Vujić ()

No 9649, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We investigate whether, why and when prosocial engagement has a causal effect on individual employment opportunities. To this end, a field experiment is conducted in which volunteering activities are randomly assigned to fictitious job applications sent to genuine vacancies. We find that volunteers get one third more interview invitations than non-volunteers. The volunteering premium is higher for females but invariant with respect to the number of engagements and the private versus public or nonprofit orientation of the job posting firm. As a result, our findings are consistent with the idea that prosocial workers sort themselves into non-commercial sectors.

Keywords: experiments; prosocial behaviour; labour market; volunteering; gender gaps; statistical discrimination; sorting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D64 J24 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2016-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Published - revised version published as 'Does it Pay to Care? Volunteering and Employment Opportunities' in: Journal of Population Economics , 2018, 31, 819 - 836.

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