A quantile-regression test of economic models of volunteer labor supply

Abstract

We estimated quantile regressions on data of volunteers of the German Red Cross (GRC) to test the predictions of three economic models of volunteer labor supply: the public-goods model, the private-consumption model, and the human-capital model for volunteer labor supply. Results of earlier research show that the data are mainly consistent with predictions of the public-goods model. We go beyond earlier research in that we trace out how the explanatory power of the three economic models changes across the quantiles of the conditional distribution of volunteer labor supply.