Huaxin Wang-Lu | Searcharxiv

arXiv2022

Bitcoin Returns and Public Attention to COVID-19: Do Timing and Individualism Matter?

The evolution of the pandemic and people's concern over it have an impact on the Bitcoin market, while the extent of individualism could differentiate investor behaviors in the financial market during the pandemic. This paper examines whether public attention to COVID-19 in individualistic countries versus collectivistic countries Granger causes Bitcoin returns between February 11, 2020 and May 09, 2022. To this end, eight large economies with a individualistic or collectivistic tradition are chosen for analyses. By using rolling and recursive-evolving algorithms, it accounts for the timing of COVID-19 issues that vary by country and circumvents the potential estimation bias that a traditional Granger causality test may suffer due largely to Google's sampling variation for different time frames. In general, collectivistic countries are found to have stronger causal impacts on Bitcoin returns than individualistic countries.

q-fin.GN↗

arXiv2022

Job Prospects and Labour Mobility in China

China's structural changes have brought new challenges to its regional employment structures, entailing labour redistribution. By now Chinese research on migration decisions with a forward-looking stand and on bilateral longitudinal determinants at the prefecture city level is almost non-existent. This paper investigates the effects of sector-based job prospects on individual migration decisions across prefecture boundaries. To this end, we created a proxy variable for job prospects, compiled a unique quasi-panel of 66,427 individuals from 283 cities during 1997--2017, introduced reference-dependence to the random utility maximisation model of migration in a sequential setting, derived empirical specifications with theoretical micro-foundations, and applied various monadic and dyadic fixed effects to address multilateral resistance to migration. Multilevel logit models and two-step system GMM estimation were adopted for the robustness check. Our primary findings are that a 10% increase in the ratio of sector-based job prospects in cities of destination to cities of origin raises the probability of migration by 1.281--2.185 percentage points, and the effects tend to be stronger when the scale of the ratio is larger. Having a family migration network causes an increase of approximately 6 percentage points in migratory probabilities. Further, labour migrants are more likely to be male, unmarried, younger, or more educated. Our results suggest that the ongoing industrial reform in China influences labour mobility between cities, providing important insights for regional policymakers to prevent brain drain and to attract relevant talent.

econ.GN↗