Extreme Temperature and Extreme Violence: Evidence From Russia

Abstract

We study the relationship between extreme temperatures and violent mortality, employing novel regional panel data from Russia. We find that extremely hot temperatures increase violent mortality, while extremely cold temperatures have no effect. The impact of hot temperature on violence is unequal across gender and age groups, rises noticeably during weekends, and leads to considerable social costs. Our findings also suggest that better job opportunities and lower vodka consumption may decrease this impact. The results underscore that economic policies need to target vulnerable population groups to mitigate the adverse impact of extreme temperatures.

Health Risks to the Russian Population from Temperature Extremes at the Beginning of the XXI Century

“…Significant violations of the body functions during temperature waves lead to severe health losses, to decrease in the number of healthy years of life, which ultimately affects economic indicators [87,88,94,190]. All results from 16 research studies mentioned above are summarized in Table 2, where the papers are arranged alphabetically by the first author in the included studies.…”

Fire takes no vacation: impact of fires on tourism

“…This municipality-specific trend may affect the outcome of interest and might correlate with burned areas. For instance, Otrachshenko et al ( , 2018Otrachshenko et al ( , 2021) include the regional time trend when estimating the relationship between temperature and mortality in Russia, and Deschênes and Greenstone (2011) include state-year effects when estimating the same relationship for the US.…”

Temperature and Decisions: Evidence from 207,000 Court Cases

“…Tiredness reduces cognitive function (Tchen et al 2003;Abd-Elfattah et al 2015), increases risk-taking (Viner et al 2003) and reduces self-control (Kahol et al 2008). 1 A wider set of behavioral research, consistent with introspection, points to the importance of transitory emotions and mind-states in influencing decisions with long-term consequences (see Loewenstein 1996 for an early survey). For instance, while Ariely and Loewenstein (2006) show that sexual arousal can impact sexual decision-making, Jahedi et al (2017) show that it can also influence a wider set of economic decisions by temporarily distorting risk attitudes.…”

“…With regard to biological adaptation to prevailing conditions, judges move around very little-they are largely attached to a single court location-meaning that they are "used to" the prevailing temperature patterns in the city in which we observe them. 2 1 There is a philosophical debate about how to conduct welfare analysis in these settings (Diamond and Vartiainen 2007). Typically preferences (say with respect to risk) are regarded as having some longevity.…”