Michaela

Michaela

Research

Work in progress

The effects of air pollution on mood: Evidence from Twitter 2024

In this paper we investigate the effects of air pollution on public mood using sentiment analysis of geolocated social media data. We analyze approximately 7 million posts from the United States in July 2015 to assess how fluctuations in air quality influence mood. We find robust evidence that higher exposure to particulate matter leads to decreased positive sentiment and increased negative sentiment. Given the importance of mood as a factor in labor productivity, our results suggest that the short-term psychological effects of air pollution, alongside its well-documented physical health impacts, should be considered in policy discussions, as negative shifts in public mood due to poor air quality could have far-reaching economic consequences.

Does Democracy Flourish in the Dark? Regional Development and Democracy Building 2024

with Lucie Coufalová, Štěpán Mikula, Michal Ševčík

This paper examines the impact of regional development on democracy building in the Czech Republic following the fall of the Iron Curtain and the autocratic communist regime in 1989. By exploiting the variation in regional development arising from the economic transition process, we identify that regional development, approximated by nighttime light intensity growth, leads to a rise in voter turnout in parliamentary elections. The heightened voter turnout is associated with increased electoral support for pro-system, pro-democratic parties, indicating that regional development facilitates democracy building. Conversely, we find no effect of regional development on the electoral support for the direct successor of the pre-1989 Communist Party. This suggests that while regional development may mitigate anti-system sentiment, it does not eliminate nostalgia for the fallen autocratic regime.