Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Meier, Dominik Stefan
• Petrig, Amadeus
• Schnurbein, Georg von

Titel

Risking Your Health to Help Others: The Effect of Pandemic Severity on Volunteering

Ist Teil von

• Nonprofit and voluntary sector quarterly, 2024-06, Vol.53 (3), p.741-769

Ort / Verlag

Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications

Erscheinungsjahr

2024

Quelle

Applied Social Sciences Index & Abstracts (ASSIA)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The COVID-19 pandemic affected the provision of voluntary work across the globe. We study informal volunteers who buy and deliver groceries for people in a high-risk group or in quarantine. Using data from a volunteering grocery delivering app in Switzerland that coordinated these volunteers, we are able to track volunteering during the pandemic. Combined with public health data on cases and deaths, we test how the severity of the pandemic affects the provision of voluntary work in the form of neighborhood grocery deliveries. We find a positive effect of the number of deaths on voluntary deliveries. However, in contrast to the literature studying the effect of the severity of the pandemic on giving, this effect is concave. We suggest that this concave effect is due to the signal of risk of infection implied by rising death rates, which is at odds with the signal of need to help others.