Does volunteering increase employment opportunities? An experimental approach

Alfonso-Costillo, Antonio and Morales-Sánchez, Rafael and López-Pintado, Dunia (2020): Does volunteering increase employment opportunities? An experimental approach.

Abstract

We study the benefits of doing volunteer work when seeking employment opportunities. We do so by sending 2000 fictitious curricula to a large online platform of job offers in the United States. Half of these curricula are randomly assigned volunteer activities. We find that people who do volunteer work receive 45 percent more callbacks for interviews. The volunteering premium is not uniform across economic sectors. In retailing and real estate, it is significant, whereas in the other sectors we have studied (animal service, technology and automobile) it is not.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: job market, volunteering, field experiment.
• Subjects: C - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods > C9 - Design of Experiments > C93 - Field Experiments; J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J6 - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers > J64 - Unemployment: Models, Duration, Incidence, and Job Search; J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J7 - Labor Discrimination > J71 - Discrimination

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