Examining the impact of extreme temperature on green innovation in China: Evidence from city-level data

Abstract

This research systematically investigates the effects of extreme temperature on green innovation outcomes from a dataset of 273 cities in China spanning 2000 to 2020. The estimation results show that daily temperature has a non-linear influence on green innovative outputs in cities of China. When the temperature fluctuates higher or lower, city-level green innovation drops accordingly - namely, extreme temperature follows lower green innovation output. Next, we utilize the three special types of innovation to see the detrimental effect is stronger in invention innovation, followed by utility innovation and design innovation. Robust analyses verify our results that when replacing the green innovation variable of trademark, it broadens the width of temperature bins. Overall, we demonstrate that the influences of extreme temperature on city-level green innovation differ remarkably for special types of innovative outputs in cities of China. Our findings contribute to the existing literature in examining the different impacts of extreme temperature on green innovation outcomes.