Voluntary work and wages

Bruna Bruno and Damiano Fiorillo ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The effects of voluntary work on earnings have recently been studied for some developed countries such as Canada, France and Austria. This paper extends this line of research to Italy, using data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) dataset. A double methodological approach is used in order to control for unobserved heterogeneity: Heckman and IV methods are employed to account for unobserved worker heterogeneity and endogeneity bias. Empirical results show that, when the unobserved heterogeneity is taken into account, a wage premium of 2.7 percent emerges, quite small if compared to previous investigations on Canada and Austria. The investigation into the channels of influence of volunteering on wages gives support to the hypotheses that volunteering enables the access to fruitful informal networks, avoids the human capital deterioration and provides a signal for intrinsically motivated individuals.

Keywords: Voluntary work; wages; Mincer equation; selection bias; instrumental variables; Italy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C31 C36 D64 J31 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm, nep-lab, nep-lma and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Journal Article: VOLUNTARY WORK AND WAGES (2016)
Working Paper: Voluntary work and wages (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:52989

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