Modern welfare policies are increasingly based on notions of reciprocity. Citizens on welfare benefits have to do something in return, e.g. volunteer work. Notwithstanding general public support, social philosophers have been critical on 'mandatory' activities in community programmes. So far,...

This paper investigates the association between personality traits and charitable behaviour, namely donations of time and money, using data from Understanding Society, the most recent large scale UK household longitudinal survey. Due to the censored nature of the outcome variables, i.e. some...

This paper explores individual motives for volunteering. The analysis is based on the interpretation of volunteering as a consumption good (consumption model) or as a mean to increase individual's own human capital (investment model). We present an econometric framework taking into account self...

This paper presents a model and experimental evidence to explain the "volunteering puzzle" where agents prefer volunteering time to donating money when monetary donations are, ceteris paribus, more efficient for providing resources to charity. In the model agents receive heterogeneous utility...