Does volunteering increase employment opportunities? An experimental approach

Antonio Alfonso, Rafael Morales-Sánchez and Dunia López-Pintado

Economics Letters, 2021, vol. 203, issue C

Abstract: We study the benefits of doing volunteer work when seeking employment opportunities. We do so by sending 2000 fictitious curricula to a large online platform of job offers in the United States. Half of these curricula are randomly assigned volunteer activities. We find that people who do volunteer work receive 45 percent more callbacks for interviews. The volunteering premium is not uniform across economic sectors. In retailing and real estate, it is significant, whereas in the other sectors we have studied (animal service, technology, and automobile) it is not.

Keywords: Job market; Volunteering; Field experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 J64 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Working Paper: Does volunteering increase employment opportunities? An experimental approach (2020)
Working Paper: Does volunteering increase employment opportunities? An experimental approach (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:203:y:2021:i:c:s0165176521001312

DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2021.109854

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