Volunteering constitutes one of the most important pro-social activities. Following Adam
Smith, helping others is the way to higher individual well-being. This view contrasts with the
selfish utility maximizer who avoids costs from helping others. The two rival views are studied
empirically. We find robust evidence that volunteers are more satisfied with their life than
non-volunteers. Causality is addressed taking advantage of a natural experiment: the
collapse of East Germany and its infrastructure of volunteering. People who accidentally lost
their opportunities for volunteering are compared to people who experienced no change in
their volunteer status.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.