Volunteering, subjective well-being and public policy

Publication type

Journal Article

Authors

Publication date

February 15, 2013

Summary:

We apply matching estimators to the large-scale British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) data set to estimate the impact of volunteering on subjective well-being. We take into account personality traits that could jointly determine volunteering behaviour and subjective well-being. We find that the impact of regular volunteering on subjective well-being is positive and increasing over time if regular volunteering is sustained. In a quantile analysis, we find that this effect seems to be driven by reducing the unhappiness of the less happy quantiles of the well-being distribution for those who volunteer regularly. We test the robustness of our findings and discuss their relevance for public policy. (c) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Published in

Journal of Economic Psychology

Volume and page numbers

Volume: 34 , p.97 -119

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2012.11.008

ISSN

1674870

Subjects

Notes

Albert Sloman Library Periodicals *restricted to Univ. Essex registered users*

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