Volunteering, Income Support Programs and Disabled Persons
Michele Campolieti,
Rafael Gomez and
Morley Gunderson ()
CLSSRN working papers from Vancouver School of Economics
Abstract:
We study the propensity of disabled persons to engage in volunteer activity with the Participation and Activity Limitation Survey (PALS) -- a unique Canadian dataset which provides extensive information on disabled persons as well as volunteering behaviour. Our principal focus is on the effects of various income support programs on disabled person’s participation in volunteer activities. We find that certain income support programs (e.g., workers’ compensation) are associated with decreases in the probability of volunteering while others (e.g., Pension Plans) are associated with increases in the propensity to volunteer. The reason is that not all income support programs are identical with respect to their implications for unpaid work. There are some – like workers compensation – that embody strong disincentives to volunteering while others like public Pensions that explicitly encourage unpaid work. Our conclusion is that program characteristics can significantly affect volunteering. This conclusion is further supported when we look at other income support programs that embody ambiguous or no incentive effects. As one would anticipate, these ‘incentive neutral’ programs have no significant impact on volunteering. The relevance of these results to both theories of volunteerism and public policy is discussed.
Keywords: Disability; Income Support Programs; Incentive Effects; Volunteer Activity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J14 J48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2009-02-16, Revised 2009-02-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-lab and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.clsrn.econ.ubc.ca/workingpapers/CLSRN%2 ... -Gomez-Gunderson.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found
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:ubc:clssrn:clsrn_admin-2009-16
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in CLSSRN working papers from Vancouver School of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Vivian Tran ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).