The Effect of Social Skills on the Link between Volunteering and Income

In this research I study the interaction of social skills expressed in terms of five personality traits, hours spent on performing unpaid work, and the income level. I propose a way to separate those volunteers who are guided by the consumption model from whose guided by the investment one on the grounds of their charitable money donations. I assume that the consumption theory driven volunteers also contribute to society through the money donations, while the investment specification driven volunteers do not give their money to charity. The results suggest that there exists a selection on the basis of the certain social skills (extraverted individuals volunteer more) among those volunteers who are guided by the consumption model. However, in the labor market these people do not choose to work less or more than the others due to the way they allocate their time between leisure, work, volunteering and household chores. In fact, they define the number of hours they have to work on the contract basis conditional on some personality traits and other common determinants, but not respectful to the volunteering time. At the same time, among those people who choose to volunteer in conformance with the investment model there has not been detected any selection on the basis of certain social skills. Although it is fair to notice that these people do obtain higher wage rates due to several personality characteristics and social skills they possess, but they have nothing to do with their choice to perform voluntary work. They also earn higher income in the future solely due to the amount of time they spent on volunteering three years ago. The optimal amount of time to be spend on unpaid activities in 2008 was roughly equal to 13.75 hours per week.