Extreme Weather and Complaints: Evidence from Chinese Netizens

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the relationship between extreme temperature and online complaints to local government officials. We show that the number of complaints significantly increases by 11.1% on extremely hot days relative to the benchmark temperature. Such effect is most pronounced on the day of extreme weather conditions and muted immediately after the extreme weather day. Among all the complaint areas, we find that 28.6% of the increase in complaints on hot days is related to public service, 42.8% to urban construction, 21.4% to noise, and 7.2% to safety. Moreover, we reveal that the primary motivators of increased complaints on hot days are not likely to be psychological factors; instead, the complaints are more likely to be associated with inadequate provision of public facilities to cope with extreme weather and inadequate management of other environmental disamenities caused by extreme temperature.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• temperature
• complaints
• China

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• Q54
• D74
• Q58

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for valuable comments from Shanjun Li. Hongjia Zhu acknowledges funding support from National Natural Science Foundation of China (72003078).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. A report on the public speech is available at the SCIO website: http://www.scio.gov.cn/32618/Document/1492614/1492614.htm

2. For example, Graff-Zivin and Neidell (2014) shows that daily temperature shocks affect allocation of time to labor and leisure activities.

3. Gentzkow et al. (2019) provides a detailed summary of the relevant text data analysis techniques and applications in economics research.

4. Regarding the cumulative effect, we find that the posts labeled ‘seeking help’ significantly increases on extremely cold days. The top five keywords of these posts include ‘wage,’ ‘property ownership certificate,’ ‘migrant workers,’ ‘rural villages,’ and ‘house delivery’

5. The full report can be accessed at http://www.oecd.org/environment/cc/policy-perspectives-climate-resilient-infrastructure.pdf