Is Volunteering Rewarding in Itself? Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Stephan Meier and Alois Stutzer

CREMA Working Paper Series from Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA)

Abstract: Volunteering constitutes one of the most important pro-social activities. Following Adam Smith, helping others is the way to higher individual well-being. This view contrasts with the selfish utility maximizer who avoids costs from helping others. The two rival views are studied empirically. We find robust evidence that volunteers are more satisfied with their life than non-volunteers. Causality is addressed taking advantage of a natural experiment: the collapse of East Germany and its infrastructure of volunteering. People who accidentally lost their opportunities for volunteering are compared to people who experienced no change in their volunteer status.

Keywords: happiness; pro-social behavior; subjective well-being; volunteering (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D64 I31 J22 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-03
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.crema-research.ch/papers/2004-12.pdf Full Text (application/pdf)
https://www.crema-research.ch/abstracts/2004-12.htm Abstract (text/html)

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:cra:wpaper:2004-12

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CREMA Working Paper Series from Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anna-Lea Werlen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).