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

Abstract

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 event 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 tracks 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 patternswe 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.

Volunteering research in Australia: A narrative review

“…Volunteers differ from non‐volunteers in terms of particular demographic, socioeconomic, and geographic characteristics. Latest findings from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey (Beatton & Torgler, ) suggested that employed, non‐married, divorced or widowed individuals volunteer less often, while volunteering is positively related to having children and being female, married, more highly educated, healthier, older, retired, and unemployed. A similar pattern of results was observed among older Australians (Warburton, Le Brocque, & Rosenman, ); those in white collar occupations and higher self‐rated health were more likely to volunteer, but not those in self‐employment.…”

“…Continuity theory would also suggest that individual maintain their volunteering role even when faced with significant life events, such as improved or worsened finances, disruption of the family/household structure, changing job, and so on. Beatton and Torgler () analysed data from 10 waves of the HILDA survey, and, in support of continuity theory, found that both improved and worsening finances contribute to increase in volunteering, albeit the effects were somewhat different across wealth/income groups. However, they also found that other life events that interfere with an individual's free time, such as moving house, being promoted, getting married, becoming pregnant or having a child, reduce volunteering.…”

Behavioral Taxation: Opportunities and Challenges

“…However, this freedom comes at a cost: the approach can neither claim the rigorous microfoundation of the Elgin and Öztunali (2012) approach, nor can it explicitly control for the endogeneity issues addressed by Alm and Embaye (2013). (Frijters et al 2011, Frijters et al 2004, Beatton and Torgler 2018, Etilé et al 2020. Cross-country evidence indicates that socio-demographic factors or exogeneous shocks matter (Torgler 2007); thus, it would be worth checking whether some of the questions relevant to behavioral taxation can be integrated into those panel surveys (the sooner the better as the real value of such datasets is appreciated many years later once enough yearly datapoints are available).…”

The effect of work‐schedule control on volunteering among early career employees

“…Studies show high degrees of autoregression in volunteering (Choi & Chou, 2010). Volunteer work also has a strong moral dimension, resulting in behavioral ‘stickiness’ in which people are reluctant to abandon behaviors they feel are right or find rewarding (Beatton & Torgler, 2018: 2192). In addition, while external circumstances undoubtedly play a role in people quitting volunteer work there are many other ‘internal’ circumstances, such as poor volunteer management, that are probably more important.…”