addition, there may be other household characteristics which affect the implicit cost of volunteering. For example, women in households with a large number of infants might be less likely to volunteer than others because the opportunity cost of their time is higher (see the seminal work by Gronau, 1973). Finally (and obviously), people with a larger taste for volunteering will volunteer more.

The labor market approach assumes that volunteering is "charity". However, if the benefits of volunteering revert primarily to the members of a narrowly-defined "community", it may be more appropriate to conceive of volunteer labor as an input into the production of a local public good (for example, Sugden, 1984).5 Community characteristics may then be important: Coleman (1988) argues that the degree of "closure" in social relations in a community is an important determinant of the social capital a group has at its disposal (see also Putnam 1993). Ostrom (1990) finds that communities have very different amounts of institutional capacity, and that strong institutions allow communities to surmount the collective action problems which make organization of volunteer labor difficult. Numerous analysts have also linked cooperation, social capital, and the level of provision of public goods by both the public and private sectors to income equality, ethnic homogeneity, and low geographical mobility (for example, van Dijk and van Winden, 1997; Goldin and Katz,1998; Alesina, Baqir and Easterly, 1997; Easterly and Levine, 1997).

Finally, if volunteering is a means of producing a local public good, the extent and nature of government activity could be important. Consider two possibilities: on the one hand, it may be that the government and volunteers provide the same services, so that government activity crowds out the volunteer sector (for example, Steinberg, 1988). Alternatively, government programs may require volunteering as a form of matching grant from the intended beneficiaries, and certain government expenditures could have a positive effect on volunteering.

some attention in the literature on volunteering in the United States (Menchik and Weisbrod; Freeman). Arguably, it is less of a concern in rural Peru, where donations of cash are very rare. The 1994 LSMS shows that less than 1% of households in rural areas donated money to charities. A 1995 ex-post beneficiary assessment of the Peruvian Social Fund (FONCODES), a government agency which funds small-scale infrastructure projects, suggests that 89% of beneficiaries contributed free labor for the execution of a project in their community, while only 11% and 8% had contributed cash and materials, respectively (Apoyo, 1995, no page number). Had these figures been broken down by rural and urban areas, the fraction of beneficiaries contributing cash in rural areas would almost certainly be much lower. White and Runge (p. 26) report similar findings for rural Haiti.

_5_ When the benefits from a local public good are concentrated, those who stand to benefit the most could simply decide to volunteer and produce it on their own (Bilodeau and Slivinski, 1996a and 1996b). If much of the community stands to benefit, however, individuals may attempt to act cooperatively. This would seem to be an invitation to free-riding, but there will be a large premium on finding a workable solution to the free-riding problem when the difference in benefits between the cooperative and noncooperative strategies is large (Ostrom).

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