%0 Report
        %A Sauer, Robert M.
        %T Does It Pay for Women to Volunteer?
        %D 2012
        %8 2012 Aug
        %I Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        %C Bonn
        %7 IZA Discussion Paper
        %N 6784
        %U https://www.iza.org/publications/dp6784
        %X This paper estimates the economic and non-economic returns to volunteering for prime-aged women. A woman's decision to engage in unpaid work, and to marry and have children, is formulated as a forward-looking discrete choice dynamic programming problem. Simulated maximum likelihood estimates of the model indicate that an extra year of volunteer experience increases wage offers in part-time work by 8.3% and wage offers in full-time work by 2.4%. The behavioral model also reveals an adverse selection mechanism which is consistent with the negative returns to volunteering found in reduced-form wage regressions. The negative selection is driven by differential unobserved market-productivity and heterogeneous marginal utilities of future consumption. The structural estimates also imply that the economic returns to volunteering are relatively more important than non-economic returns, and introduction of a tax-credit for volunteering-related childcare expenses would substantially increase volunteer labor supply and female lifetime earnings.
        %K female labor supply
%K marriage
%K fertility
%K negative selection
%K attrition
%K dynamic programming
%K structural estimation
%K simulated maximum likelihood
%K volunteering