Author:Jason Shachat，Matthew J. Walker，Lijia Wei

Abstract: We examine how the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus in the Hubei province of China impacted pro-social behavior and attitudes toward risk and uncertainty. The study repeatedly applies a panel of financially incentivized individual and strategic decision tasks via the WeChat social media platform to a population of preregistered Wuhan University students. We find that the initial outbreak coupled with the lock-down of Wuhan City led to an uptick in altruism, trust, and ambiguity aversion and a downtick in risk aversion. Over the remaining samples, we observed that all measurements return to baseline levels except for risk aversion.

This article was published in AEA Papers and Proceedings (formerly AER Papers and Proceedings), Volume 111 in 2021, a B+ journal of the School of Economics and Management of Wuhan University. The corresponding author is Professor Wei Lijia, and the first author Jason Shachat is Professor Luojia. Original link: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pandp.20211002.