TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Dolan, Paul
AU  - Krekel, Christian
AU  - Shreedhar, Ganga
AU  - Lee, Helen
AU  - Marshall, Claire
AU  - Smith, Allison
        TI  - Happy to Help: The Welfare Effects of a Nationwide Micro-Volunteering Programme
        PY  - 2021/May/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 14431
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp14431
        AB  - There is a strong suggestion from the existing literature that volunteering improves the wellbeing of those who give up their time to help others, but much of it is correlational and not causal. In this paper, we estimate the wellbeing benefits from volunteering for England's National Health Service (NHS) Volunteer Responders programme, which was set up in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Using a sample of over 9,000 volunteers, we exploit the oversubscription of the programme and the random assignment of volunteering tasks to estimate causal wellbeing returns, across multiple counterfactuals. We find that active volunteers report significantly higher life satisfaction, feelings of worthwhileness, social connectedness, and belonging to their local communities. A social welfare analysis shows that the benefits of the programme were at least 140 times greater than its costs. Our findings advance our understanding of the ways in which pro-social behaviours can improve personal wellbeing as well as social welfare.
        KW  - subjective wellbeing
KW  - volunteering
KW  - pro-social action
KW  - quasi-natural experiment
KW  - social welfare analysis
KW  - COVID-19
        ER  -