Time Isn't Money? Empirical Evidence for Motivations Behind Volunteer Labor Supply

Abstract

25% of the US population engages in about 8 billion hours of volunteer work annually, but empirical evidence for the factors that determine whether a person volunteers, and the quantity that one volunteers, has not been sufficiently explored. Based on utility functions for the private consumption, investment, and public goods models of volunteerism, I discern observable characteristics for each of these latent motivations – personal earnings and family income, age and seeking work, and volunteering hours by others, respectively. US Current Population Survey data shows that private consumption and investment motivations significantly affect whether an individual volunteers, but the crowding out effect of the public goods model does not. Furthermore, inconsistent results between tobit and ordinary least squares analyses leave the models’ impact on volunteering hours ambiguous, suggesting both that different factors influence whether someone volunteers and how many hours one volunteers, and that the tobit regressions commonly used in previous volunteer research may not be reliable.