Abstract
Drawing on socio-psychology and economics literature contributions, this paper provides an original conceptual framework examining whether and how natural disasters exert any influence on nuptiality. Scholars suggest that disasters remind people about the transience of life and mortality. This feature triggers shifting towards intrinsic meaningful goals — such as commitment to relationships; at the same time, it fosters people’s proximity and support-seeking from their security providing attachment figures and leads to accelerate life transition choices. In this view, disasters are expected to positively impact on people’s intentions to marry. Such an effect is evident in case of natural hazards determining slight damage to physical capital (buildings, productive locations, etc.) which have limited economic consequences that do not hamper marriage intentions. Meanwhile, in the case of highly disruptive disasters, these positive psychological pushes are counterbalanced or even exceeded by the negative economic consequences of the disaster, which inhibit marriage intentions. These predictions are supported by an empirical analysis that relies on a difference-in-differences investigation of municipality-level nuptiality data collected in the Abruzzo region of Italy before and after the major 2009 L’Aquila earthquake.
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Notes
See for example the following article, published in the Italian newspaper Avvenire on January 2011 and available at https://www.avvenire.it/attualita/pagine/laquila-matrimoni-nascite_201101101046026830000 [last access on 15/9/2019].
The assumption of a stable secular trend may not be helpful here, because positive and negative differences may even out if the trend is slightly U-shaped.
According to Eurostat, the mean age at first marriage in Italy was 33 in 2009, and 35.5 in 2019. The analysis has also been replicated on the rate of marriages for those aged 20 to 30, 30 to 40, and 40 to 50. The results of the analysis performed on each of these indicators are consistent in sign and statistical significance with the aggregate rate for the population aged 20 to 50. In order to save space the results are not reported, but are available upon request to the authors.
The results are not reported in order to save space, but are available upon request to the authors.
Municipalities in the first tier are those adjacent to the area of L’Aquila, while municipalities in the second tier are those adjacent to the area of first tier municipalities. The analysis was replicated excluding L’Aquila municipality only, and excluding L’Aquila and first tier municipalities. The results, which are available upon request, remain substantially unchanged.
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Cicatiello, L., Ercolano, S., Gaeta, G.L. et al. The effect of natural disasters on nuptiality: evidence from L’Aquila earthquake (Italy). Popul Environ 43, 445–469 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-022-00396-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-022-00396-y