EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The valuation of volunteer labor

Neil Bania and Laura Leete ()

Chapter 16 in Handbook of Research on Nonprofit Economics and Management, 2018, pp 323-336 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Considerable theoretical and empirical progress has advanced our understanding of the role and value of the volunteer, resulting in improved estimates of volunteer labor valuation. Yet this task still involves conceptual and methodological challenges. Conceptually, costs and benefits accrue to the organization, the volunteer, and to society. Depending on one’s purpose, the focus may be on one or more of these concepts. To date, researchers have pursued three approaches: opportunity cost, replacement cost, and organizational value. Methodological challenges result from a lack of consensus on how to define volunteerism. There is still no comprehensive assessment of methodological differences for counting volunteer hours and researchers have not clearly documented which approaches yield the most accurate estimates. More generally, on-going analysis of volunteer hours in national datasets is largely missing and research that directly measures either the replacement value or the organizational value of volunteers is in its infancy.

Keywords: Business and Management; Economics and Finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781785363511/9781785363511.00024.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
Chapter: The Valuation of Volunteer Labor (2010) Downloads
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:elg:eechap:16909_16

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:elg:eechap:16909_16