Good Will Hunting: Do Disasters Make Us More Charitable?

Serhan Cevik

No 2023/022, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: Humans are usually compassionate, caring and empathetic toward others, but are we really hardwired 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 contributes 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 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; genorosity; prosocial behavior; card transactions; Baltics; Estonia; Latvia; Lithania; credit card transactions; government welfare program; real-time analysis; government intervention; pandemic shock; COVID-19; Consumer credit; Total expenditures; Global (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 14
Date: 2023-02-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env and nep-tra
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Journal Article: Good Will Hunting: Do Disasters Make Us More Charitable? (2024)
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