Good Will Hunting: Do Disasters Make Us More Charitable?Annals of Economics and Finance, 2024, vol. 25, issue 1, 275-287 Abstract: Humans are usually compassionate, caring and empathetic toward others, but are we really hard-wired for altruism when a disaster hits? There is evidence that people exposed to natural disasters tend to behave more philanthropically, but most studies rely on small-scale surveys and experimental data. For that reason, this paper makes a novel contribution to the literature by investigating whether the COVID-19 pandemic has altered prosocial tendencies and charitable donations, using a novel daily dataset of debit and credit card transactions. I conduct a real-time analysis of actual charitable donations in three European countries (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) and find that the COVID-19 pandemic and government interventions have no significant effect on how much people contribute to charities as a share of total spending. A higher preference for precautionary savings in the midst of the pandemic appears to outweigh altruistic behavior, while government welfare programs crowds out private charitable donations. Keywords: Natural disasters; COVID-19 pandemic; Charitable giving; Donations; Generosity; Prosocial behavior; Card transactions; Baltics; Estonia; Latvia; Lithuania (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cuf:journl:y:2024:v:25:i:1:cevik Access Statistics for this article Annals of Economics and Finance is currently edited by Heng-fu Zou More articles in Annals of Economics and Finance from Society for AEF Contact information at EDIRC. |
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