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There is extensive literature on the determinants of job tenure insecurity. However, very little is known about the individual drivers of labour market insecurity. Additionally, while a piece of literature shows that volunteering improves workers' income, no study considers volunteering as an activity which could help workers to feel more confident about their perception of labour market insecurity if they lost or resigned their jobs. Therefore, purpose of this paper is to study whether workers who volunteer are less likely to perceive labour market insecurity.

The paper employs data from the sixth European working conditions survey which provides a great deal of information on working conditions. For the empirical investigation, probit model as well as robustness analysis have been implemented.

Results show that employees who do voluntary activities have a greater likelihood of declaring perceived labour market insecurity, which is nearly 3 percentage points lower, than employees who do not volunteer. Findings suggest that governments need to improve the relationship between for-profit and non-profit sectors to encourage volunteering.

This is the first study which considers volunteering as an activity which could help workers to feel more confident about their perception of “labour market insecurity”. Most of the studies on “labour market insecurity” do not focus on the workers individual characteristics but mainly on the labour markets institutional characteristics and welfare regimes differences.

This paper examines the relationship between human and social capital and participation and frequency of visits to museums, archaeological sites and monuments, controlling for any possible demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. It reviews the literature on the determinants of heritage participation to highlight the importance of educational attainment and the lack of work on social relations.

It uses the microdata of the “Multipurpose Survey on Households – Aspects of Daily Life”, available from the Italian Statistical Office for the years 2015–2020, to estimate ordered probit and zero-inflated ordered probit models.

The results show that Italians’ participation in cultural heritage activities and the frequency of such participation are primarily related to education level, followed by social interaction variables. However, when we interplay education level and social relations variables, the findings show that people with a high school qualification (diploma) who meet friends several times a week and are satisfied with relationships with friends display negative correlations with participation and frequency in cultural heritage activities. Other important determinants of the participation and frequency of cultural heritage activities are gender, student status, foreign citizenship and higher occupations.

To our knowledge, this is the first paper that studies the role of human and social capital in heritage cultural participation in Italy as well as the first study in literature on cultural participation that analyses the interplay between human capital and social relations.