Benjamin Bittschi

Paid and unpaid labor in nonprofit organizations: Does thesubstitution effect exist?

In non-profit organizations (NPOs), volunteers often work alongside paid workers. Such a co-production setting can lead to tension between the two worker groups. This article examines for the first time if and how volunteers influence the separation of paid employees, and thus it contributes to the debate over whether volunteers can substitute paid workers. Using Austrian data at the organizational level, we find a significant impact of volunteers on the separations of paid workers in NPOs facing increased competition. These findings support the assumption that a partial substitution effect exists between paid workers and volunteers.

Paid and Unpaid Labour in Non-Profit Organizations: Does the Substitution Effect Exist?

In non-profit organizations (NPOs), volunteers often work alongside paid workers. Such a co-production setting can lead to tension between the two worker groups. This article examines for the first time if and how volunteers influence the separation of paid employees, and thus it contributes to the debate over whether volunteers can substitute paid workers. Using Austrian data at the organizational level, we find a significant impact of volunteers on the separations of paid workers in NPOs facing increased competition. These findings support the assumption that a partial substitution effect exists between paid workers and volunteers.

Housing and Health

Deprived housing conditions have long been recognized as a source of poor health. Nevertheless, there is scant empirical evidence of a causal relationship between housing and health. The literature identifies two different pathways by which housing deprivation affects health, namely, neighborhood effects and the effects of the individual dwelling unit. However, a joint examination of both pathways is absent from the literature. Moreover, endogeneity is a substantial concern in analyses of these two problems. Thus far, studies addressing endogeneity concerns have done so through experimental design or instrumental variables. While the first approach suffers from problems of external validity, we demonstrate the substantial difficulty in identifying robust and reliable instruments for the latter. Consequently, we adopt an alternative strategy to identify the causal effects of housing on health in 21 European countries by estimating fixed-effect models and considering both sources of endogeneity, neighborhoods and dwellings. Furthermore, using the panel dimension of our data, we reveal the accumulation dynamics of poor housing conditions. Our results indicate that living in poor housing is the chief socioeconomic determinant of health over the four-year observation period and that bad housing is a decisive, causal transmission pathway by which socioeconomic status affects health.

Remittances and public finances : evidence from oil-price shocks

We study the effect of inflowing remittances - a major source of capital for many countries - on tax-revenues and tax-policy. Instrumenting remittances with changes in the oil-price interacted with a countrys distance to oil-producing countries, we find that remittances have a large positive effect on VAT revenues but no effect on income-tax revenues. This suggests that remittances often escape the income tax but can be taxed via consumption. We further show that tax policy is responsive to shocks in incoming remittances: remittances make the adoption of VAT-systems more likely, and they lead to lower VAT-rates and higher income-tax rates.

On Tax Evasion, Entrepreneurial Generosity and Fungible Assets

We estimate the effects of income from various sources on charitable giving using administrative German income tax data. We demonstrate that charitable contributions are not uniformly affected by different income types. While business and capital income exhibit a positive effect, the remaining income sources do not influence charity on statistically signifcant levels. This exercise is not new and has been conducted for (at least) three different purposes: 1) Relying on the described results, a public finance researcher would state that business and capital income are more prone to tax evasion than the remaining income sources. 2) An entrepreneurship researcher would conclude that business owners are more generous than employees, and 3) a researcher testing the validity of the life cycle theory (or its behavioral counterpart) would refute the fungibility of income. In contrast, we argue that none of these approaches can answer the intended question if solicitation effects of fundraising or measurement error of the income sources are not taken into account. Applying a fixed effect poisson model, we demonstrate that under certain assumptions the results can have a meaningful interpretation.

The Effect of Volunteers on Paid Workers’ Excess Turnover in Nonprofit and Public Organizations:

Volunteers in nonprofit and public organizations can provide additional resources and exert positive influence on organizations, staff, and clients. However, the relationship between paid staff and volunteers is complex and may lead to tension, employee dissatisfaction, and, ultimately, workers leaving the organization. This article focuses on excessive worker turnover as a signal of delicate organizational health and analyzes whether volunteers are an important variable in explaining differences in excess turnover rates between organizations. Using Austrian survey data and applying Tobit regressions, we show that more volunteers in management tasks compared with volunteers employed in other tasks increase both the probability of experiencing excess worker turnover and the amount of excess turnover. This result is interpreted as a possible sign for volunteer–staff tension. Understanding the consequences of using volunteer labor for paid workers is important to prevent volunteering from backfiring on service capacity and quality in public and nonprofit organizations.

Philanthropy in a Secular Society

In this study we investigate the relationship between religious and charitable giving. We test how income, the tax-price of giving and the German church tax, differently affect charitable donations of church members, individuals leaving church and non-church members. We find crowding in between the church tax and charitable giving for church members, but not for the church-leavers. In contrast to church members, donations of church-leavers and non-members are also highly responsive to the tax deductibility. Additionally, non-donors exhibit a significantly increased probability of leaving church compared to donors. Finally, we demonstrate that leaving church increases donations on the extensive margin but decrease giving along the intensive margin.