Does higher social diversity lower people's contributions to public goods? The case of volunteering in New Zealand

Samuel Thornton and Jeremy Clark

New Zealand Economic Papers, 2010, vol. 44, issue 1, 27-59

Abstract: New Zealand society is becoming more heterogeneous. A growing body of international literature suggests that heterogeneity lowers people's contributions towards public goods and social capital. We use two iterations of New Zealand census data to estimate the effect of ethnic, religious, income and language heterogeneity on neighbourhood volunteering rates while controlling for other factors. We use cross-section and fixed-effects analysis under various specifications, measures of diversity, and level of neighbourhood. Our cross-sectional results find that most dimensions of heterogeneity are negatively related with volunteering, consistent with international findings. However, our fixed effects results are much weaker, and cannot fully address the endogeneity problems posed by people's self-selection into neighbourhoods.

Keywords: heterogeneity; volunteering (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00779951003614065 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:nzecpp:v:44:y:2010:i:1:p:27-59

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RNZP20

DOI: 10.1080/00779951003614065

Access Statistics for this article

New Zealand Economic Papers is currently edited by Dennis Wesselbaum

More articles in New Zealand Economic Papers from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().