Concern over resilience to natural disasters often focuses on moral hazard; expectations of disaster assistance may lead households in hazard-prone communities to forego insurance. This has been dubbed “charity hazard” in the literature on natural disasters. We examine flood insurance uptake using household level survey data and employ instrumental variables (related to local history of aid distribution and political economy) to address endogeneity of individual expectations of eligibility for disaster assistance. To avoid potential problems with reverse causation, we drop any households that could have received payments in the past (triggering mandatory flood insurance purchase). We find coastal households that exhibit positive expectations of disaster aid eligibility are 25 to 42 percent less likely to hold flood insurance. We estimate that charity hazard could be responsible for 817,000 uninsured homes in the United States corresponding to a loss of $526 million in forgone annual revenue for the National Flood Insurance Program.

对自然灾害的抵御能力的关注通常集中在道德风险上。对灾难援助的期望可能会导致易灾社区的家庭放弃保险。在有关自然灾害的文献中，这被称为“慈善危害”。我们使用家庭水平的调查数据检查洪水保险的使用情况，并采用工具性变量（与当地的援助分配历史和政治经济学有关）来解决个人对救灾资格期望的内生性。为了避免因果关系引起的潜在问题，我们丢弃了过去可能已经收到付款的所有家庭（触发了强制性洪水保险购买）。我们发现，对灾难援助资格抱有积极期望的沿海家庭，持有洪水保险的可能性降低了25％至42％。