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Carrie Conko
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Mercatus Center at George Mason University
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Weathering Corruption
August 23, 2006
In this working paper, Drs. Leeson and Sobel examine whether bad weather be responsible for U.S. corruption. Natural disasters create resource windfalls in the states they strike by triggering federally-provided natural disaster relief. Like windfalls created by the "natural resource curse" and foreign aid, disaster relief windfalls may also increase corruption. They investigate this hypothesis by exploring the effect of FEMA-provided disaster relief on public corruption. The results support their hypothesis. Each additional $1 per capita in average annual FEMA relief increases corruption nearly 2.5 percent in the average state. Eliminating FEMA disaster relief would reduce corruption more than 20 percent in the average state. Their findings suggest that notoriously corrupt regions of the United States, such as the Gulf Coast, are notoriously corrupt because natural disasters frequently strike them.
The ideas presented in this research are the authors' and do not represent official positions of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
