Volunteering and perceived health. A European cross-countries investigation

In this paper, we study the effect of formal and informal volunteering on self-perceived health across 9 European countries after controlling, amongst other things, for socio-economic characteristics, social and cultural participation. We employ the 2006 wave of EU-SILC for estimating recursive trivariate probit models with instrumental variables. Our results show that although formal and informal volunteering are correlated with each other, they have a different impact on health. Formal volunteering has a significant positive effect on self-perceived health in the Netherlands, but none in other countries. By contrast, informal volunteering has a significant negative effect on self-perceived health in Austria, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and Italy.