1. Introduction
Volunteers earn a premium on the paid labour market in comparison to non-volunteers. Several reasons explain why this might be the case: volunteers may acquire skills that are valued by the labour market; the act of volunteering may emit a signal regarding some unobservable but desirable trait of the individual; or, by volunteering, individuals are exposed to a valuable network of contacts who aid them in furthering employment prospects. In any event, the paid labour-market is rewarding volunteers over and above their non-volunteering counterparts - a result that was first confirmed by Day and Devlin (1998) using the 1987 survey of voluntary activity (VAS), and subsequently corroborated by Devlin (2000) with the 1997 Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating (SGVP).
Devlin (2000) determines that, on average, volunteers earn more than 4 per cent higher earnings in comparison to their non-volunteering counterparts. To establish this figure, various earnings equations were estimated which included, among the usual determinants of earnings, dummy variables denoting the individual's region of residence. Moreover, the decision to volunteer was also estimated and regional dummy variables were included in those regressions as well. An individual's region of residence often proved to be a significant determinant of both earnings and the decision to volunteer.
Two questions naturally arise: what are the regional differences in the labour market responses to volunteering? And, why should the region in which an individual resides matter? It is the presence of a new and improved data set on volunteering that allows one to empirically investigate questions as specific as these. The empirical analysis focuses primarily on addressing the first question regarding regional labour-market responses to volunteering - a question that has, until now, been ignored in the literature; the econometric results are used to inform a discussion as to why regional differences may exist.
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