On the relational motive for volunteer work Lionel Prouteau a , Franc ¸ois-Charles Wolff a,b, * a LEN, Department of Economics, Universite ´ de Nantes, BP 52231 Chemin de la Censive du Tertre, 44322 Nantes Cedex 3, France b CNAV and INED, Paris, France Received 7 April 2006; received in revised form 2 July 2007; accepted 2 August 2007 Available online 14 August 2007 Abstract While economists have mainly focused on investment or altruistic motives to explain why people undertake volunteer activities, we rely instead in this paper on the relational motive previously emphasized by social psychologists. Volunteering is seen as a way to build friendly relationships. Drawing on the French survey Vie Associative conducted by INSEE in 2002 on volunteer work and association membership, we shed light on the relevance of this relational motive using two sam- ples of, respectively, 1578 volunteers and 2631 participants in associations. According to their own statements, many volunteers seek to make friends and to meet other people through these activities. Econometric results show that working as a volunteer in an association has a causal impact on the probability of making friends in that association, which also supports the relational motive. Ó 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. JEL classification: L31; Z13 PsycINFO classification: 2910; 3020 Keywords: Volunteering; Motivations; Relational goods 0167-4870/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.joep.2007.08.001 * Corresponding author. Address: LEN, Department of Economics, Universite ´ de Nantes, BP 52231 Chemin de la Censive du Tertre, 44322 Nantes Cedex 3, France. Tel.: +33 240141779. E-mail addresses: lionel.prouteau@univ-nantes.fr (L. Prouteau), wolff@sc-eco.univ-nantes.fr (F.-C. Wolff). URLs: http://www.univ-nantes.fr/prouteau-l (L. Prouteau), http://www.sc-eco.univ-nantes.fr/~fcwolff (F.-C. Wolff). Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Journal of Economic Psychology 29 (2008) 314–335 www.elsevier.com/locate/joep