No abstract

The pandemic evolution and people's concern over it have an impact on the Bitcoin market, while the extent of individualism differentiates how individuals respond to preventive measures and how investors behave on the financial market during the pandemic. This paper examines if public attention to COVID-19 in individualistic vs. collectivistic countries Granger causes Bitcoin returns between February 11, 2020 and May 09, 2022. In particular, from a time-varying perspective, it accounts for variations in the timing of COVID-19 issues across countries and circumvents the potential estimation bias that a Granger causality test could suffer, due largely to Google's sampling variation for different time frames. By comparing eight typically individualistic and collectivistic countries, the results show that collectivistic countries present a stronger pattern of causal relationships with Bitcoin returns than individualistic countries.

China's structural changes have brought new challenges to its regional employment structure, entailing spatial redistribution of workforce. However, Chinese research on migration decisions involving future outcomes and on city-level bilateral longitudinal determinants is almost non-existent. This paper sheds light on 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, expanded the random utility maximisation model of migration by introducing the reference-dependence, 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 prefecture-level cities, providing important insights for regional policymakers to prevent brain drain and to attract relevant talent.