Weathering Corruption

Peter T. Leeson () and Russell Sobel
Additional contact information
Russell Sobel: Department of Economics, West Virginia University

No 06-07, Working Papers from Department of Economics, West Virginia University

Abstract: Could bad weather be responsible for U.S. corruption? This paper argues that natural disasters create resource windfalls in the states they strike by triggering federally-provided natural disaster relief. Consistent with the theory that natural resource and foreign aid windfalls increase public corruption, disaster relief windfalls likely do as well. We investigate this hypothesis by exploring the effect of FEMA-provided disaster relief on public corruption. The results support our hypothesis. Each additional $1 per capita in average annual FEMA relief increases corruption nearly 2.5 percent in the average state. Eliminating FEMA disaster relief would reduce corruption more than 20 percent in the average state. Our findings suggest that notoriously corrupt regions of the United States, such as the Gulf Coast, are notoriously corrupt because natural disasters frequently strike them.

New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-reg
Date: 2006

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.be.wvu.edu/div/econ//work/pdf_files/06-07.pdf First version, June, 2006 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Weathering Corruption (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wvu:wpaper:06-07

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, West Virginia University
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Alexei Egorov (). This e-mail address is bad, please contact .