Damiano Fiorillo

Do Monetary Rewards Crowd Out the Intrinsic Motivation of Volunteers? Some Empirical Evidence for Italian Volunteers

The paper studies the determinants of regular volunteering, taking its cue from the previous literature on extrinsic and intrinsic motivations. Its main contribution lies in the analysis of the role of monetary rewards in influencing intrinsic motivation. It uses frameworks that allow empirical hypotheses to be made about the effects of monetary rewards, intrinsic motivation and the combined term on volunteer labour supply. With an Italy-based survey, the paper shows, controlling for endogenous bias, that monetary payments as well as intrinsic motivation have roles in the real-life decision to supply volunteer work, but monetary rewards do not crowd out intrinsic motivation.

Le determinanti del capitale sociale in Italia

Il presente lavoro studia il processo d’accumulazione del capitale sociale in Italia. Il paper utilizza come concetto di capitale sociale le relazioni interpersonali e come principali misure empiriche di questa definizione la partecipazione attiva e passiva in organizzazioni sociali e la frequenza con cui s’incontrano gli amici, e si sviluppa lungo le linee seguenti. Applica una metodologia di statistical matching al dataset MULTISCOPO dell’Istat e al dataset SHIW-HA della Banca d’Italia per costruire dati cross section ripetuti, sulla base dei quali e analizzato il processo d’accumulazione del capitale sociale in Italia. I risultati ottenuti per l’Italia, come per gli Stati Uniti, mostrano come l’istruzione e il reddito familiare sono variabili rilevanti nella determinazione delle diverse misure di capitale sociale. Contrariamente agli Stati Uniti, la disuguaglianza del reddito non e una variabile rilevante nell’accumulazione di capitale sociale in Italia. Altra determinante significativa e la partecipazione religiosa, per la quale e lecito suggerire che essa possa risultare abbastanza interessante quale variabile strumentale con cui considerare e trattare il problema dell’identificazione econometrica specificato in Durlauf (2002, F469).

Volunteer work and domain satisfactions: evidence from Italy

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyze the determinants of three domain satisfactions, focusing on volunteer work supplied in official non-profit service associations. Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses the data from the Multiscopo Survey of Households (MSH) conducted by the Italian Central Statistical Office for the years 1993-1995-1998-2000 for empirical investigations with ordered probit and ordinary least square estimations. A statistical matching procedure to impute missing values on household income in MSH is also performed. Findings – The paper finds that volunteering is positively correlated with satisfaction with leisure, with relationships and economic well-being. These findings are interpreted as an indication that the benefits gained from volunteering are a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations as well as the production and consumption of relational goods. In addition, results for Italy confirm findings gathered from domain satisfaction studies for other Europe countries with some novel evidence. Originality/value – Studies on domain satisfactions have received much less attention than happiness and life satisfaction. The paper contributes to the literature by carrying out the first assessment of the socio-economic determinants of domain satisfactions in Italy from an economic perspective and the first empirical analysis on the relationship between volunteering and domain satisfactions. Overall, the value-added of the study is two-fold. First, it isolates empirically the reasons by which unpaid labour supply may be associated with individual life satisfaction. Second, it validates the empirical results of the few previous studies on domain satisfactions for some European countries using cross sectional and longitudinal data.

Voluntary work and wages

The effects of voluntary work on earnings have recently been studied for some developed countries such as Canada, France and Austria. This paper extends this line of research to Italy, using data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) dataset. A double methodological approach is used in order to control for unobserved heterogeneity: Heckman and IV methods are employed to account for unobserved worker heterogeneity and endogeneity bias. Empirical results show that, when the unobserved heterogeneity is taken into account, a wage premium of 2.7 percent emerges, quite small if compared to previous investigations on Canada and Austria. The investigation into the channels of influence of volunteering on wages gives support to the hypotheses that volunteering enables the access to fruitful informal networks, avoids the human capital deterioration and provides a signal for intrinsically motivated individuals.

Social participation and self-rated psychological health: A longitudinal study on BHPS

Although social capital has been hypothesized to have positive influence on psychological health, a relationship between social capital dimensions and psychological wellbeing has rarely been found. This longitudinal study investigates the relationship between social participation in associations and self-rated psychological health. The paper uses five waves of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) from 1991 to 1995 (unbalanced panel N=45,761). Ordered logit fixed effect methods were used to study the longitudinal link between structural social capital (being a member, active, and both a member and active in associations) and self-rated psychological health assessed by single items of the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) controlling for age, marital status, household size, number of children, education, income, economic status, number of visits to the GP and health problems. The paper shows that being only a member and only active in associations has no statistical relationship with almost all the items of the GHQ-12. Instead, being both a member and active in associations is linked to all “positive” items of self-rated psychological health and to two main “negative” items of psychological wellbeing. These findings highlight the protective role of being both a member and active in associations against poor psychological health outcomes.