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The Sunday Paper – Weather Variations, Climate Change, and Demand for in-theater Movie Recreations: Evidence from High-Frequency Movie-Viewing Data in China

I think the researchers (Chen Xi from the Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management, et al.) may be taking themselves a little too seriously with this paper that draws a line between climate change and future movie attendance in China (and by implication elsewhere).

There’s a useful point though in terms of how weather affects outdoor recreational activity. Obviously, golfers tend to stay off the links when temperatures are low and pickle ball players challenge fewer neighbors as temperatures rise. No revelation there.

What the researchers found here though, from their analysis of movie going trends in China from 2015~2017, was that excessively hot weather kept potential viewers away from theaters.

[The vertical grey-dash line corresponds to the optimum human comfort temperature]

This is counterintuitive to my (admittedly-narrow) European hard-wiring. I tend to think of warmer meaning more activity but, of course, ‘warmer’ in my formative years meant anything north of 20-degrees.

I would further have presumed extreme-heat would drive people into movie theaters not kept them out; but that’s to ignore the generally enervating effect of intense ambient heat.

[A pertinent aside. Years ago in a factory in China I noted air conditioning for the garment workers at odds with the ‘sweat-shop’ caricature I’d expected to find. I complimented the owner on this humane consideration but was told love for his fellow human beings hadn’t entered the calculation; “They don’t work so hard when it’s too hot” was the more commercial explanation.]

Whether one can quantify the long term effects of climate change on a single industry, as this paper attempts to do, I have my doubts. The general point though, that excessively warmer weather in future may retard recreational (and thus economic) activity, does seem well made.

What theme-park, movie theater operators and the like can do about this though is the harder and perhaps unanswerable question?

You can read the work in full via this link Movie Going and Weather

Happy Sunday

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