Work, Worship, and Welfare: How Earthquakes Reshape Labour Supply Preferences

We revisit a classic question in economics: how severe shocks to life circumstances affect the allocation of time individuals want to devote to work relative to worshiping and other non-market activities. We study stated labour-supply preferences, measured by respondents’ views on whether placing less importance on work in life is a good thing, bad thing, or neither. We develop a reference-dependent preferences model in which earthquakes depress material living standards relative to consumption reference points and heighten the perceived value of non-market activities such as family time, religiosity, community engagement, and support for income redistribution. As these activities become more salient and time-intensive after a shock, they compete with labour for scarce time resources, lowering labour-supply preferences even when wages and employment conditions remain unchanged. We then take the theory to the data us ing a Difference-in-Differences design that merges district-level seismic intensity with individual-level longitudinal responses from 195,000 individuals in the World Values Survey across 96 countries. We find that earthquakes persistently increase acceptance of placing less importance on work, and this shift coincides with stronger valuation of non-monetary job attributes, higher religiosity, greater membership in religious organ isations, and a temporary rise in support for redistribution.