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Calamity, Aid and Indirect Reciprocity: the Long Run Impact of Tsunami on Altruism

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  • Leonardo Becchetti

    () (Università di Roma "Tor Vergata")

  • Stefano Castriota

    (Università di Roma "Tor Vergata")

  • Pierluigi Conzo

    () (Università di Napoli and CSEF)

Abstract

Natural disasters have been shown to produce effects on social capital, risk and time preferences of victims. We run experiments on altruistic preferences on a sample of Sri Lankan microfinance borrowers affected/unaffected by the tsunami shock in 2004 at a 7-year distance from the event (a distance longer than in most empirical studies). We find that people who suffered at least a damage from the event behave in dictator games less altruistically as senders (and expect less as receivers) than those who do not report any damage. Interestingly, among damaged, those who suffered also house damages or injuries send (expect) more than those reporting only losses to the economic activity. Since the former are shown to receive significantly more help than the latter we interpret this last finding as a form of indirect reciprocity.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy in its series CSEF Working Papers with number 316.

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Date of creation: 30 May 2012
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Handle: RePEc:sef:csefwp:316

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Keywords: tsunami; disaster recovery; social preferences; altruism; development aid;

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