Lagging behind by doing good: How volunteering prolongs unemployment

This study contributes new insights into whether volunteering improves the employment prospects of jobless individuals by examining its relationship with the speed at which they secure new jobs— an outcome that has received limited attention in previous research. Our comprehensive data enables us to investigate this by constructing an event history dataset that merges information from the Danish Volunteer Survey with administrative register data. Our results show that when we adjust for variations in education and labor market experience, jobless individuals who volunteer remain unemployed approximately two weeks or 31 percent longer than those who do not. Although our results remain correlational, they challenge the wisdom of promoting volunteering as a reemployment strategy, which some governments in European countries already do while others consider doing so. We recommend that policymakers reconsider the promotion of volunteering as a reemployment tool and call for further research into the relationship between volunteering and unemployment duration, particularly in different national contexts.