Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/236462 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 14431
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
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.
Subjects: 
subjective wellbeing
volunteering
pro-social action
quasi-natural experiment
social welfare analysis
COVID-19
JEL: 
I31
I38
D61
D64
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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