Volunteering and self-assessed health within EU28: evidence from the 6th European Working Conditions Survey

Volunteering is remarkably widespread in almost all the European countries and the number of people involved has been growing over time. In recent years, some scholars stimulated an interesting discussion to assess whether volunteering exerts beneficial effects also for the volunteers themselves. It is well known that people who volunteer are likely to gain work experience, raising their future employability (when unemployed) and earning power (when employed). Moreover, some empirical studies show the presence of a wage premium for volunteers. Studies that validate the health benefits of volunteering are numerous, so that non-profit organizations started using them to highlight such results in volunteers' recruitment campaigns. The paper aims at detecting the effects of volunteering (and those of other free and philanthropic activities) on self-perceived health, using data stemming from the Sixth European Working Conditions Survey, carried out in 2015, which provides a wide-ranging picture of Europe at work, across countries, occupations, sectors and age groups. Our analysis is focused on workers' responses to investigate whether the ones who volunteer report a better self-assessed health, highlighting the effects of some specific drivers. Since this kind of qualitative variables are naturally ordered, we implemented an ordered probit model.