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Natural disasters often create adverse impacts on the livelihoods of people, especially those living in developing economies where access to safety nets is limited. Disasters not only destroy physical, human, and social capital of households, catastrophic disasters can lead to a change in risk, time, and social preferences. 1 In addition, largely unexpected and rare disasters as well as the success or failure of safety net institutions in coping with disasters may lead to a revision of subjective expectations of future events. Such impacts could induce changes in behavioural choices that could in turn affect long-term economic development and resilience to future floods. Understanding these consequences also has crucial policy implications for the design of incentivecompatible safety nets and development programmes for agricultural households in rural economies.

This paper aims to make a contribution to the growing literature on the impacts of catastrophic events (natural disasters or civil conflicts) on household preferences and behaviours by studying the consequences of the 2011 mega flood in Cambodia—the country’s biggest flood in recent history—on preferences, subjective expectations, and behavioural choices of affected Cambodian rice-farming households. We use the 2011 mega flood as a natural experiment and utilise discontinuity generated by this flood to create variations in flood exposure across sampled villages and households. Field surveys and experiments were used to elicit key preferences, expectations and behavioural choices.