Natural Disasters and Indicators of Social Cohesion

Do adversarial environmental conditions create social cohesion? We provide new answers to this question by exploiting spatial and temporal variation in exposure to earthquakes across Chile. Using a variety of methods and controlling for a number of socio-economic variables, we find that exposure to earthquakes has a positive effect on several indicators of social cohesion. Social cohesion increases after a big earthquake and slowly erodes in periods where environmental conditions are less adverse. Our results contribute to the current debate on whether and how environmental conditions shape formal and informal institutions. © 2017 Calo-Blanco et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.