Abstract
This paper examines whether receipt of public or private assistance is associated with recipients’ own generosity in the form of formal and informal volunteering. Using matched data from the 2007–2011 American Time Use Survey and the Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey, this paper finds that receipt of private assistance from friends and relatives is negatively associated with the time women spend caring for non-household adults and the time men spend caring for non-household children. Receipt of public assistance is found to be negatively associated with men’s care of non-household adults. No associations are found between either type of assistance and time spent volunteering for a formal organization.
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Notes
Non-labor income is used to identify the selection models as non-labor income should affect whether or not someone is employed but not his or her wage, according to the standard time allocation model. An error term, constructed as a draw of a standard normal variable times the standard error of the regression, is appended to each prediction.
A correlated Tobit model in which the time-use Tobits are estimated jointly could improve the efficiency of the estimates. This is because the time constraint for each individual affects all uses of time and thus the errors may be correlated across equations. However, while the cmp command in STATA technically allows a system of Tobits to be jointly estimated, attempts to estimate such a correlated Tobit model failed due to a lack of convergence. Although less efficient, single equation estimation still results in unbiased and consistent estimates.
Marginal effects are calculated for each observation and averaged across observations. Due to the use of the ATUS replicate weights, standard errors for the marginal effects are not appropriate. Indeed, the margins command in STATA will not even compute them.
Unadjusted Wald tests performed using the testparm command in STATA show that, in most models, the estimated coefficient on the public assistance receipt variable is not statistically different from the estimated coefficient on the private assistance receipt variable. The one exception is men’s time spent caring for non-household adults.
Recall that estimation of a simultaneous system of Tobit models did not lead to convergence. However, joint estimation of a system of uncensored regressions is possible and is implemented in order to enhance the efficiency of the estimates.
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Kalenkoski, C.M. Does generosity beget generosity? The relationships between transfer receipt and formal and informal volunteering. Rev Econ Household 12, 547–563 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-013-9209-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-013-9209-6