The impact of rising temperatures on social conflict in China (opens in new tab)

We examine the causal effect of temperature on social conflict in China, with a specific focus on labor unrest including strikes and worker protests—which constitutes a frequently overlooked form of social conflict. Using city-daily weather data matched with social conflicts (2014–2020), we employ a high-dimensional fixed effects to account for time-invariant city characteristics and common temporal shocks, thereby isolating plausibly exogenous temperature variation. We find that a one-standa...