Charitable donations to natural disasters: evidence from an online platform

Abstract

We investigate the demand and supply of charitable donations to natural disasters on a large online platform. We document that the bulk of charitable donations goes to a tiny fraction of natural disasters, which tend to be severe disasters that receive media coverage. Charities do not fundraise for the remaining 96% of disasters, which account for 80% of casualties. Using an event study-type design to explore temporal patterns in charitable donations, we find that fundraising and giving for disaster relief occur in a timely fashion, but that both are effectively absent for disasters that occur within a 2-month window of large disasters which have attracted massive funding. We also find no evidence that donations to disasters crowd out those to other charitable causes.