Earthquake Hazard and Civic Capital

Abstract

We examine the empirical relationship between the exposure to earthquake hazard and civic capital in Italian municipalities. Drawing on the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, we find that earthquake hazard increases civic capital. We decompose the effect of earthquake hazard variation along four dimensionsfrequency, space, magnitude, and timingand observe that the effect is mostly explained by high-magnitude seismic events in the past. Our results are in line with the intuition that cooperative social norms build over a very long time span.

The social consequences of organized crime in Italy

“…Failing to do so may lead to lower institutional trust and lower political participation. Buonanno et al (2021) discuss how the Irpinia earthquake affected social capital due to the ineffectiveness of the state to provide public goods. In Medellin, Blattman et al (2022) show that increasing state presence in areas overrun by organized crime groups has limited influence on state legitimacy because the state struggles to meet citizens' expectations.…”

“…For some time, individual social capital characteristics were thought to be persistent given the stickiness of cultural and normative values in families and communities across history (Putnam 1994). Although many individual choices with respect to political participation, civic engagement, and trust may persist across time, and often across generations, it is now well-documented that such choices may change in response to a myriad of factors, including natural shocks (Buonanno et al 2021), wars (Guriev and Melnikov 2016), changes in regulatory rules (Aghion et al 2010), corruption (Banerjee 2016), income shocks (Ananyev and Guriev 2019), teaching practices (Algan et al 2013), technology (Olken 2009;Geraci et al 2022), and social norms (Alesina et al 2018;Depetris-Chauvin et al 2020;Mousa 2020;Alan et al 2021;Alrababa'h et al 2021;Weiss 2021). Notably, since Putnam (2000), several studies have documented a persistent erosion of social capital in developed economies (see Inglehart and Welzel (2005)), with an acceleration of such erosion after the 2007-08 financial crisis, as illustrated by the rise of political polarisation, individualism, and social mistrust (Algan et al 2017;Guriev and Papaioannou 2020).…”

The role of civic capital on vaccination

“…(2016), we define civic capital as the set of “shared beliefs and values that help a group overcome the free rider problem in the pursuit of socially valuable activities.” These mutual values are important in bad times. From a theoretical point of view, indeed, any threat to human activities can spur cooperative behavior among individuals (e.g., climate disasters (Buggle & Durante, 2021), earthquakes (Buonanno et al., 2021), etc.). As a public health threat, the COVID‐19 pandemic gave individuals the incentive to commonly contribute to the public good, for example, comply with the vaccination campaign.…”