Does it pay to care? Volunteering and employment opportunities.

We investigate whether volunteering has a causal effect on individual employment opportunities. To this end, a field experiment is conducted in which volunteering activities are randomly assigned to fictitious job applications sent to genuine vacancies in Belgium. We find that volunteers are 7.3 percentage points more likely to get a positive reaction to their job applications. The volunteering premium is higher for females but invariant with respect to the number of engagements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]