Volunteer Labour Supply: the role of workers' motivations

Abstract In this paper we study the determinants of volunteering. We depart from previous literature that considers only economic incentives and investigate the role that extrinsic and intrinsic motivations play in shaping the supply of voluntary labour. We build on previous theoretical research and derive a framework for interpreting results from our econometric analysis. We consider a sample of Italian workers of which we can observe proxies of motivations and volunteering choices in three different sectors: social services, political activism and union activism. We make due allowance for the endogeneity of motivations and show that both types of motivations have an effect on volunteering. Consistently with theoretical models, we find extrinsic motivations to lower voluntary labour supply, whereas the opposite holds for intrinsic motivations .     

The effect of non-employment-based health insurance program on firm's offering of health insurance: Evidence from the social health insurance system in China

To achieve universal health insurance coverage, many developing countries have established a segmented health insurance system, which contains separate programs for workers with formal employment and residents without formal employment. A potential concern with such a segmented system is that the establishment of a non-employment-based insurance program may generate a disincentive for firms to provide health insurance benefits to workers. In this study, we empirically examine this crowd-out effect of a non-employment-based insurance program, the Urban Residents Basic Medical Insurance (URBMI), in China. Exploiting city-by-year variations in the roll-out process of the program and utilizing a unique administrative dataset on Chinese firms, we find that the enactment of URBMI reduced a firm's offering of an employment-based health insurance program by a statistically significant 0.94-1.29 percentage point. This crowd-out effect was stronger among domestic private firms, new firms, and firms that are individual-owned.     

Social interaction and children's academic test scores: Evidence from the National Child Development Study

We explore the relationship between educational attainment and social interaction using individual level data from the British National Child Development Study. To be specific, we analyze whether an intergenerational aspect to this relationship exists by examining the relationship between the educational attainment of children and the degree of formal social activity undertaken by their parents. Our results suggest that children's scores in reading, mathematics and vocabulary tests are positively associated with the extent of their parents’ formal social interaction, and this relationship is robust to alternative definitions of social interaction.     

Volunteering and life or financial shocks: does income and wealth matter?

Volunteering is a dominant social force that signals a healthy state. However, although the literature on volunteering is extensive, knowledge on how life’s discontinuities (life and financial shocks) affect volunteering is limited because most studies work with static (cross-sectional) data. To reduce this shortcoming, we use longitudinal data from Australia (HILDA) that track the same individuals over time to assess how individuals from different income and wealth groups respond to life and financial shocks with respect to volunteering. Although both income and wealth can act as buffers against life shocks by providing stability and reducing vulnerability – which decreases the need to actually change behaviour patterns – we observe more heterogeneity than expected and also stickiness at the lowest income levels. Response delays in post-shock volunteering also suggest that volunteering habits may be driven and influenced by strong commitment and motivation that are not shattered by life or financial shocks. In fact, the amount of time spent volunteering tends to increase after negative income shocks and decrease after positive income shocks.     

Revealed value of volunteering: A volunteer centre network

This article deals with the revealed value of volunteering. The revealed value approach is one way to determine the value of non‐market goods or services. Most studies focused on the value of volunteering have built their research on the presumption that there is no way to reveal the value of volunteering, and therefore proxies must be used. This research uses a plausibility probe case study to explore and identify revealed information about the value of volunteering. The research was conducted using data over a seven‐year period (2012–18) from ADRA, a large volunteer centre network in the Czech Republic that has 14 volunteer centres coordinating more than 2,500 volunteers in about 50 cities. I used the data about all the public funding of all the centres in this network between 2012 and 2018 in order to calculate the revealed value of volunteering from the perspective of various governmental institutions. I calculated the total value of volunteering, including financial grants, donations, and the value of volunteer hours. Interestingly, all three values were found within or slightly around the interval estimate of the value of volunteering.     

The effect of opposite sex siblings on cognitive and noncognitive skills in early childhood

We investigate the effect of having opposite sex siblings on cognitive and noncognitive skills of children in the United States at the onset of formal education. Our identification strategy rests on the assumption that, conditional on covariates, the sibling sex composition of the two firstborn children in a family is arguably exogenous. With regard to cognitive skills, learning skills and self-control measured in kindergarten, we find that boys benefit from having a sister, while there is no effect for girls. We also find evidence for the effect fading out as early as first grade.     

Build it and they will come: Volunteer opportunities and volunteering

Formal volunteering refers to an individual's unpaid contribution of time to the activities of a charitable or non-profit organization. While the physical presence of these organizations is usually required for citizens who want to volunteer, neighbourhoods vary with respect to the amount of volunteering opportunities available. We are the first to geo-code information on the location of registered charities and the location of individuals, using full six-digit postal codes, to examine how the physical proximity of charities affects the decision to volunteer. We carefully address the possibility that proximity to charities might be endogenous: organizations and volunteers may respond to similar unobservable factors when deciding where to locate. Our results imply that access does matter for the decision to volunteer: one more charity within a 1 km buffer around an individual's residence increases the predicted probability of volunteering by 0.8%. The impact of an additional charity on the likelihood of volunteering decreases with distance from the individual's residence and is more pronounced for urban dwellers, providing further evidence that the location of charities matters when it comes to nudging individuals to volunteer.     

Does non-employment based health insurance promote entrepreneurship? Evidence from a policy experiment in China

Previous researchers have shown that employment-based health insurance lowers job mobility and deters entrepreneurship. The Urban Resident Basic Medical Insurance (URBMI) program, piloted in 2007 in China and fully established in 2009, offers health insurance to about 271 million urban residents without formal employment. Before the implementation of URBMI, most urban residents obtained health insurance through their employers, and therefore a large number of unemployed and self-employed individuals were uninsured. Thus, URBMI creates a new insurance option that does not depend on formal employment and may promote entrepreneurship. We take advantage of this policy change to evaluate the effect of URBMI on self-employment. Using 2000–2011 data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey and a difference-in-differences approach with propensity score weighting, we found that URBMI increased self-employment rate by at least 8.73% for the overall population. The result was mainly driven by the URBMI’s impact on unhealthy workers, individuals with 12 years of schooling or less, and workers above 30 years old.     

组织惯性、激励机制与新型企业的治理实践

在新型公司的治理实践中，除了正式的激励机制之外，组织惯性作为非正式的激励机制发挥着关键的互补作用。组织惯性是企业的各利益群体之间形成并维系的一组关系合约集合，它反映了嵌入在组织内部的群体认知。组织惯性提供了正式激励机制所嵌入的组织社会情境，受正式激励机制影响的同时又对组织的正式激励机制产生影响。新型企业的治理实践必须保持两者的匹配与协同演化。     

社会资本影响农村中小企业正规信贷可得性的实证分析——基于福建省350个样本的调查

针对我国农村中小企业正规信贷融资难的问题,本文基于2008年福建省农村350家中小企业的调查数据,采用Logistic回归模型,对企业主社会资本对农村中小企业正规信贷可得性的影响进行了实证分析。结果表明:网顶、熟人信任、贷款认知性3个因子对农村中小企业正规信贷可得性具有显著的正向影响;普遍信任、规范2个因子对农村中小企业正规信贷可得性具有显著的负向影响;网络规模、特殊信任2个因子对农村中小企业正规信贷可得性没有显著影响。     

The stabilization role of police spending in a neo-Keynesian economy with credit market imperfections

Motivated by a seemingly persistent “twin-high” phenomenon in Latin America, we present a novel theoretical framework that has linkages between three institutions (education, criminal justice, and credit) to study policy-pertinent research questions with regards to whether police spending has the potential to serve as an unconventional policy tool for macroeconomic management. Based on a stylized parameterization, we find formal and illegal human capital to share common cyclical properties, which can be "decoupled" under a rule-based regime to police spending. This nonetheless comes at a cost of a greater propagation of the credit friction-induced financial accelerator effect.     

Reputation,volunteering, and trust: Minimizing reliance on taste-based explanations

We develop a model of public good contributions as signals of the contributor's trustworthiness, and test the predictions of this model using data on volunteering in small Swiss towns. Unlike most previous work, we avoid assuming that agents simply have a taste for prestige, and instead model the material value of a prosocial reputation. The model predicts that, specifically in small communities with low population turnover where reputation is important, volunteering will decline with age (as the end of the agent's reputational game approaches). In communities with higher turnover, this effect will not be observed. Our results support this hypothesis. The model also implies that the presence of a public good which must be provided voluntarily enhances trust in bilateral market and non-market interactions.     

农村正规金融会抑制经济增长吗?——以陕西为例

基于陕西省1978年～2009年时间序列数据,分别运用Johansen协整检验,向量误差修正模型和方差分析方法对陕西农村正规金融与经济增长的长期和短期关系进行检验。结果表明:短时期内,农村正规金融对经济增长具有正向促进作用,按其贡献率的大小分别是农村正规金融发展水平、资本边际生产率、农村金融体系效率以及农村储蓄率,但各变量的长期关系反映出农村正规金融发展水平和效率会对农村经济增长产生抑制作用。     

制度环境约束下的企业绩效分析——基于中国东北地区企业的实证研究

针对中国转型时期的经济增长之谜,现有研究分别基于社会关系和分权制度进行探讨。本文综合上述两种观点,将社会关系和正式制度微观化为企业的关系资本和制度资本,并进一步把关系资本细分为商业关系资本和政治关系资本,从而将宏观制度环境纳入到微观企业绩效的分析框架中。实证研究采用基于残差正态分布的有序选择模型对东北地区313家企业进行回归分析,我们发现:商业关系资本与绩效水平和绩效增长均显著正相关;政治关系资本与绩效增长呈倒U型曲线关系;制度资本与绩效水平呈二次曲线关系,而其与商业关系资本的综合效应能够显著提升企业绩效水平,促进绩效增长。     

Financial development,financial liberalization and social capital

The relationship between financial liberalization policies and financial development is controversial. The impact of these policies differs greatly across countries. In the literature, the quality of formal institutions has been identified as an important source of this heterogeneity, as countries with a weak institutional environment generally fail to benefit from financial liberalization. Using panel data covering 82 countries for the period 1973–2008, we find evidence that social capital may substitute for formal institutions as a prerequisite for effective financial liberalization policies. In particular, we find that during the post Washington-consensus period countries with a high prevailing level of social capital can ensure that financial liberalization positively influences financial development, despite the poor quality of their formal institutions.     

AN EXAMINATION OF VOLUNTEER MOTIVATION IN CREDIT UNIONS: INFORMING VOLUNTEER RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

ABSTRACT: Volunteer recruitment and retention is a problem that most credit unions experience. Research suggests that knowledge of volunteer motivation can inform volunteer management strategies. This paper uses a survey approach to determine whether current volunteers in credit unions in Northern Ireland are more motivated by the actual act of volunteering, by the output from the volunteering activity (including altruism) or because the volunteering activity increases their human capital value. Altruistic reasons are found to be the most influential, with the act of volunteering also scoring highly. This knowledge should inform volunteer recruitment programmes and internal appraisal processes as management can reinforce messages that provide positive feedback to volunteers on the social benefits being achieved by the credit union. This will further motivate current volunteers, ensuring retention. When motivation was analyzed by volunteer characteristics we found that older volunteers, retired volunteers and volunteers who are less educated are more motivated in their role. There was little evidence that individuals volunteer to improve their human capital worth.     

Social Capital and the Shadow Economy

Viewed in a wider context of paid and unpaid informal economic activities, the shadow economy highlights the little recognized ambivalence of social capital as both potentially positive and negative in outcomes for different groups in the economy. Using a concept of social capital as access to durable networks of actual and virtual resources, as claimed by Pierre Bourdieu, I examine the shadow economy as a source of both resilience and repression, intimately connected to the formal economy and tied to a neo-liberal agenda. I draw from review activities I have previously conducted on the informal economy in disadvantaged neighborhoods and from research on social capital in the economy in a European context.     

健康人力资本与农户收入增长——基于CHNS数据的经验研究

基于中国健康与营养调查(CHNS)的面板数据,采用固定效应模型,估计了中国农村地区农户健康人力资本对种植业收入的影响。结果显示,几乎所有的健康测量指标都影响到农户的种植业收入,但不同健康指标的影响存在差异性,其中自评健康(SRH)的影响最为显著。身体质量指数(BMI)和热量摄入与农户收入之间呈非线性关系,其边际效应的转折点分别为28.68kg/m2和5164.36kcal。此外,年龄和教育等非健康指标对农户收入并没有显著影响。     

教育人力资本、健康人力资本与地区经济增长差异——基于中国省际面板数据的实证研究

在M-R-W增长模型框架下,将人力资本的内涵扩展至教育和健康两个方面。用教育收益率修正了教育人力资本指标,而健康则主要从投入角度加以测度。应用传统的固定效应模型和动态面板模型(DGMM)估计教育人力资本、健康人力资本对地区经济差异的影响。结果显示,人力资本促使全国省际间人均GDP增长出现明显的"俱乐部"收敛现象,而三大地区内部的经济增长则表现出条件收敛趋势。从教育人力资本产出弹性可以看出,东部地区经济增长的驱动力正从物质资本向人力资本方向转变。以每万人拥有床位数代表的健康人力资本促进了全国及区域范围内的经济增长。     

社会网络、心理资本与居民健康的城乡比较

利用中国综合调查数据(CGSS2008),从社会网络、心理资本的视角比较分析了城乡居民健康的影响因素和作用机制。教育程度对于农村居民健康的积极作用要远远大于城市居民;社会网络有助于居民健康水平的提高,但对于城乡居民的健康呈现不同的作用效应,即网络规模更有助于农村居民的健康,而网络资源总量更有助于城市居民的健康;心理资本有助于居民健康水平的提高,其中韧性因子对城乡居民的健康都具有显著的积极作用,乐观因子对农村居民的健康更有显著的积极作用,而自信因子对城市居民的健康更有促进作用。