Does It Pay for Women to Volunteer?

Robert Sauer

No 6784, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper estimates the economic and non-economic returns to volunteering for prime-aged women. A woman's decision to engage in unpaid work, and to marry and have children, is formulated as a forward-looking discrete choice dynamic programming problem. Simulated maximum likelihood estimates of the model indicate that an extra year of volunteer experience increases wage offers in part-time work by 8.3% and wage offers in full-time work by 2.4%. The behavioral model also reveals an adverse selection mechanism which is consistent with the negative returns to volunteering found in reduced-form wage regressions. The negative selection is driven by differential unobserved market-productivity and heterogeneous marginal utilities of future consumption. The structural estimates also imply that the economic returns to volunteering are relatively more important than non-economic returns, and introduction of a tax-credit for volunteering-related childcare expenses would substantially increase volunteer labor supply and female lifetime earnings.

Keywords: female labor supply; marriage; fertility; negative selection; attrition; dynamic programming; structural estimation; simulated maximum likelihood; volunteering (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C35 C53 C61 D91 J12 J13 J22 J24 J31 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2012-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-dge
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published - published in: International Economic Review, 2015, 56(2), 537-564

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Related works:
Journal Article: DOES IT PAY FOR WOMEN TO VOLUNTEER? (2015)
Working Paper: Does it Pay for Women to Volunteer? (2015)
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