Happy to Help: The Welfare Effects of a Nationwide Micro-Volunteering Programme

Paul Dolan (), Christian Krekel, Ganga Shreedhar, Helen Lee, Claire Marshall and Allison Smith
Additional contact information
Paul Dolan: London School of Economics
Ganga Shreedhar: London School of Economics
Helen Lee: National Health Service
Claire Marshall: National Health Service
Allison Smith: Royal Voluntary Service

No 14431, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: There is a strong suggestion from the existing literature that volunteering improves the wellbeing of those who give up their time to help others, but much of it is correlational and not causal. In this paper, we estimate the wellbeing benefits from volunteering for England's National Health Service (NHS) Volunteer Responders programme, which was set up in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Using a sample of over 9,000 volunteers, we exploit the oversubscription of the programme and the random assignment of volunteering tasks to estimate causal wellbeing returns, across multiple counterfactuals. We find that active volunteers report significantly higher life satisfaction, feelings of worthwhileness, social connectedness, and belonging to their local communities. A social welfare analysis shows that the benefits of the programme were at least 140 times greater than its costs. Our findings advance our understanding of the ways in which pro-social behaviours can improve personal wellbeing as well as social welfare.

Keywords: subjective wellbeing; volunteering; pro-social action; quasi-natural experiment; social welfare analysis; COVID-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D61 D64 I31 I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 93 pages
Date: 2021-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-hap, nep-hea, nep-ltv and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Happy to help: The welfare effects of a nationwide micro-volunteering programme (2021)
Working Paper: Happy to help: the welfare effects of a nationwide micro-volunteering programme (2021)
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