The entrepreneurship literature has advanced our understanding of how natural disasters affect new venture founding in their wake. However, despite providing valuable insights, most existing studies focus on theoretical mechanisms that, explicitly or implicitly, invoke material losses or do not hone in on the theoretical effect of human losses caused by these events. This is an important omission because the social psychology literature suggests that individual reactions to human death are not only stronger than (i.e., higher in scale), but qualitatively different (i.e., infinitely stronger) from, those involving other types of losses. The present study addresses this oversight by drawing from the social psychology literature on the emotive and cognitive heuristics (e.g., the incidental emotion and availability biases) induced by human death and developing and testing a theory of how the death toll caused by natural disasters decreases new venture founding by inducing irresolvable uncertainty. Moreover, the study draws from research on how strong pre-disaster local participation in voluntary associations—by increasing the social, symbolic, cultural and material resources in a community—protects against such negative effects. Contributions to both the post-disaster venturing and the broader resiliency literatures are discussed.

Executive summary

Natural disasters are on the rise, and the United Nations predicts that these phenomena will pose the single most important threat to social, political and economic stability in the upcoming decades. Entrepreneurship holds great promise for helping regions recover from the havoc wreaked by these events. However, much of the existing entrepreneurship research has not focused sufficiently on how the human death toll caused by natural disasters affects subsequent new venture creation. This is an important question because the existing psychology literature suggests that human death elicits disproportionately high negative individual reactions, which may lead prospective entrepreneurs in afflicted regions to stop or delay their plans to start new ventures, precisely at the time when those ventures are needed the most to help with regional recovery. This study fills this gap by examining how the death toll caused by natural disasters affect new venture creation in counties in the United States between 1991 and 2018. The study finds that the death toll caused by natural disasters in a county has a negative effect on post-disaster venturing in that county, but that strong pre-disaster participation in voluntary associations (e.g., the Girl Scouts, parent teacher associations, etc.) protects against this effect because it allows communities to work together to overcome the challenges posed by these deadly events. This last result highlights the importance that policymakers at every government level and local communities realize the critical role that local participation in voluntary associations prior to deadly disasters can have in fostering entrepreneurship after such events, thereby accelerating regional recovery.

创业文献加深了我们对自然灾害如何影响其后新创企业的理解。然而，尽管提供了有价值的见解，但大多数现有研究都集中在理论机制上，这些机制明示或暗示地引发了物质损失，或者没有研究这些事件造成的人类损失的理论影响。这是一个重要的遗漏，因为社会心理学文献表明，个体对人类死亡的反应不仅强于（即规模更大），而且在性质上也不同（即无限强）) 从那些涉及其他类型的损失。本研究通过借鉴关于人类死亡引起的情绪和认知启发式（例如，附带情绪和可用性偏差）的社会心理学文献，并开发和测试自然灾害造成的死亡人数如何减少的理论来解决这种疏忽。通过引入无法解决的不确定性来创建风险投资。此外，该研究还借鉴了有关灾前地方自愿协会的强大参与（通过增加社区的社会、象征、文化和物质资源）如何防止此类负面影响的研究。讨论了对灾后冒险和更广泛的恢复力文献的贡献。

执行摘要

自然灾害正在增加，联合国预测这些现象将在未来几十年对社会、政治和经济稳定构成最重要的威胁。创业精神有望帮助地区从这些事件造成的破坏中恢复过来。然而，许多现有的创业研究并没有充分关注自然灾害造成的人类死亡人数如何影响随后的新创企业。这是一个重要的问题，因为现有的心理学文献表明，人类死亡会引起不成比例的高度负面个人反应，这可能导致受灾地区的潜在企业家停止或推迟他们开始新企业的计划，而恰恰是在需要这些企业的时候最有助于区域恢复。本研究通过考察自然灾害造成的死亡人数如何影响 1991 年至 2018 年间美国各县的新创企业，填补了这一空白。 - 该县的灾难风险，但灾前积极参与志愿协会（例如，女童子军、家长教师协会等）可以防止这种影响，因为它允许社区共同努力克服这些致命的挑战事件。最后一个结果强调了各级政府和当地社区的决策者认识到在致命灾难发生前当地参与志愿协会对于在此类事件发生后培养创业精神的关键作用的重要性，