Does it Pay to Work for Free? Negative Selection and the Wage Returns to Volunteer Experience

This paper offers the first instrumental variables estimates of the wage
returns to volunteer experience. The returns are substantial and dier
considerably by gender. The results imply that the unequal valuation
of volunteer experience by gender is more important in explaining the
gender earnings gap than is the unequal valuation of part-time paid work
experience. The results also indicate negative selection into unpaid work.
In a simple model of optimal volunteering, negative selection implies that
a lower cost of volunteering would produce both an expanded and higher-
skilled pool of volunteers, and greater societal benets from volunteer
work.