Earthquake hazard and civic capital

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 exploit variation across neighboring municipalities and use a neighbor-pair fixed effect estimator to establish a causal link between earthquake hazard and the accumulation of civic capital. We decompose the effect of earthquake hazard variation along four dimensions – frequency, space, magnitude, and timing – and 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.