Volunteering and firefighters' response time

Francis Petterini and Murilo Demarchi ()
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Murilo Demarchi: Military Fire Corps of Santa Catarina

Economics Bulletin, 2019, vol. 39, issue 2, 1018-1029

Abstract: One out of ten Brazilian cities has a fire station, but because of volunteering in the Santa Catarina state this ratio is one out of two. While it is clear the volunteering is useful to spread the service, it is not clear whether the firefighter's service quality worsens with the volunteers. The article's purpose is analysis this by considering the response time as a quality indicator. Exploring a database of more than 600,000 attended emergencies, and using propensity score matching and regression procedures, it is concluded that are not worsens in the response time when volunteers are in the teams. This it is pointing that a similar volunteering policy can raise the coverage rate of the emergency services, and consequently it can improve social welfare.

Keywords: volunteering; firefighters; emergency response time (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H4 R5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-05-02
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