Individuals and Communities: the Importance of Neighbors Volunteering

Abstract

In this analysis, I examine the effects of community-level volunteering on an individual's choices regarding time -whether to work and whether to volunteer. In order to better explain the decision to volunteer, a classic pure public goods structure is contrasted with a less restrictive impure public goods model that admits other possible private motivations. The results of this study undermine the neoclassical notion that volunteering can be understood solely as a pure public good that is provided less when others are seen to be contributing. In fact, individuals are found to be more, not less, likely to volunteer when others in their communities do so. An innovative instrumental variables strategy is used to account for reflection bias and the possible endogeneity caused by selective sorting of individuals into neighborhoods, which allows for a causal interpretation of these results. Employment regressions provide preliminary evidence that average volunteering relates, to some extent, with the decision of whether to participate in the labor force. Variations in the effect of average volunteering across age and gender are also explored. The present work is unique by virtue of its use of a large and representative dataset, along with rigorous statistical testing. I use United States Census 2000 Summary File 3 and Current Population Survey (CPS) 2004-2007 September Supplement file data and control for various individual and community-level characteristics.

Why and how hotel groups in luxury segments give back to their communities

“…S5 concludes that, contrary to H5, an altruistic culture in the country (causal condition 6) is a sufficient condition to assure group participation, even when employee involvement (causal condition 5) does not appear as a causal condition. From this solution, we can also infer that hotel groups imitate the prosocial behaviour of other groups in their area (Neymotin, 2016) even when there is no demand to do so from customers and employees. Moreover, this solution shows that 100% of cases come under the two types of capitalism found in S3 (six groups in USA, seven in UK, five in Canada, one in Australia, and one in Ireland).…”

“…Along these lines, Ramasamy, Yeung, and Au The existence of social conventions could explain the relationship between altruism and culture in countries even when the focus is not religion. From this perspective, people imitate the prosocial behaviour of others (Nook, Ong, Morelli, Mitchell, & Zaki, 2016), resulting in similar behaviour in spatial and social proximities (Neymotin, 2016). This shared altruism might influence the behaviour of customers, employees and managers and, as a result, their involvement in communities.…”

Pathways to Late-Life Volunteering: A Focus on Social Connectedness

“…Having contact with friends, for instance, appears to be a stronger predictor for actual and potential volunteering than older adults’ individual characteristics and resources (Dury et al, 2015). Likewise, being socially integrated increases the chances of being aware of volunteer opportunities or being asked to volunteer (Neymotin, 2016; Okun & Michel, 2006; Yörük, 2008).…”

Showing Up after the Storm: Our "Fickle" Bleeding Heart?

“…From a pure public goods perspective, one might think that a highly publicized disaster would tend to encourage individuals to do less volunteering, since it is clear in the case of such a large disaster that others will presumably be picking up the slack (Freeman, 1997;Samuelson, 1954). On the other hand, when a larger number of people are seen to volunteer in particular, it has been shown that individuals are more likely to also do so (Neymotin, 2016), whether from a desire for prestige, networking and relationships, or from increased warm glow effects (Andreoni, 1990;Harbaugh, 1998;Prouteau and Wolff, 2008). Thus, the initial a priori assumption regarding the direction of effects immediately resulting from a disaster like a hurricane is not obvious given these countervailing neoclassical and behavioral economic forces.…”