CIREQ-Concordia Seminar
joint with the Department of Economics, Concordia University
room H-1145 (Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd ouest, 11th floor)
Organizer : Huan Xie (Concordia University)
This talk will combine results from Never Too Busy to Help: Experimental Evidence on the Effect of Employment on Volunteering and Does Working Make You Sick? Experimental Evidence on the Heterogeneous Effect of Employment on Health.
ABSTRACTS
“Interest in volunteerism has grown due to population aging, rising female labour force participation, and the reduced role of governments in social service provision. While volunteering may reflect consumption motives (intrinsic satisfaction) or investment motives (improving job prospects), identifying its relationship with employment is difficult because both reflect behavioural time-allocation decisions. We use data from a Canadian randomized experiment that provided access to paid employment for up to three years. Exploiting random assignment, we estimate the causal effect of employment on volunteering at both the intensive and extensive margins. We find that employment increases both the likelihood and the frequency of volunteering. Positive but smaller effects persist immediately after the experiment, suggesting that volunteering is more complementary to employment than a substitute for paid work. Finally, our set identification results show that our main findings remain robust even when the functional form and parametric assumptions underlying the first-stage model are relaxed.”
“Using data from a unique randomized experiment we provide new evidence on the causal relationship between employment and health assessed both in the short- and medium-run. We first use an encouragement design framework and find clear evidence that gaining employment as a result of experimental assignment leads to immediate and sustained improvements in self-reported general health, with significant gender differences in the short-run. We next estimate marginal treatment effects to characterize treatment effect heterogeneity. This analysis uncovers that individuals with stronger baseline motivation are more likely to enter employment, however the largest health gains accrue to those with weaker initial incentives to work. These findings reveal positive selection into employment but negative selection in health returns, underscoring that labour market policies can shape not only employment outcomes but also population health”.
