How important is pro-social behaviour in the delivery of public services?

Paul Gregg, Paul A. Grout, Anita Ratcliffe (), Sarah Smith and Frank Windmeijer ()

The Centre for Market and Public Organisation from Department of Economics, University of Bristol, UK

Abstract: A number of papers have posited that there is a relationship between institutional structure and pro-social behaviour, in particular donated labour, in the delivery of public services, such as health, social care and education. However, there has been very little empirical research that attempts to measure whether such a relationship exists in practice. This is the aim of this paper. Including a robust set of individual and job-specific controls, we find that individuals in the non-profit sector are significantly more likely to donate their labour, measured by unpaid overtime, than those in the for-profit sector. We can reject that this difference is simply due to implicit contracts or social norms. We find some evidence that individuals differentially select into the non-profit and for-profit sectors according to whether they donate their labour.

Keywords: pro-social behaviour; public services; donated labour; motivation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H11 J32 J45 L31 L32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-ltv and nep-pbe
Date: 2008-05
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http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2008/wp197.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: How important is pro-social behaviour in the delivery of public services? (2011)
Journal Article: How important is pro-social behaviour in the delivery of public services? (2011)
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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bri:cmpowp:08/197

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