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Bitcoin exchanges and cultural analysis

This project analyses co-movement between Bitcoin exchanges in 34 major countries around the world and the US (the global benchmark) over the period January 24, 2011 - January 7, 2019. More specifically, we run IV regressions to investigate the importance of cultural factors (such as tightness, individualism, trust and risk-taking) following an earlier study by Eun et al. (2015) which had shed light on their importance to explain stock co-movement within individual countries.

The results suggest that markets in tighter, more individualistic, trustful and risk-taking societies are more tightly linked to the US one. Further, it appears that culturally looser, collectivistic, trustful and risk-taking countries are more likely to shut down their Bitcoin exchanges compared to other countries. These findings confirm our priors. Our analysis documents the importance of cultural variables as determinants of cross-country Bitcoin price co-movement and exchange shutdown decisions and casts doubt on the reliability of the findings of previous studies (e.g., Katsiampa, 2019; Shams, 2019) which are likely to have been affected by omitted variable bias.


Meet the Principal Investigator(s) for the project

Professor Guglielmo Maria Caporale
Professor Guglielmo Maria Caporale - Guglielmo Maria Caporale is Professor of Economics and Finance, Divisional Lead for Economics and Econometrics, and Director of the Centre for Empirical Finance at Brunel University London. He is also a CESifo Research Network Fellow and an RCEA (Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis) Senior Fellow. Prior to taking up his current position, he was a Research Officer at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research in London; a Research Fellow and then a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Forecasting at London Business School; Professor of Economics at the University of East London; Professor of Economics and Finance and Director of the Centre for Monetary and Financial Economics at London South Bank University (LSBU). He has also been Visiting Professor at both London Metropolitan University and LSBU, Research Professor at DIW Berlin and an NCID (Navarra Center for International Development) Non-Resident Fellow. He carries out editorial duties for various academic journals (including Journal of International Money and Finance, International Review of Economics and Finance, International Economics, Machine Learning with Applications, Journal of Economics and Finance, SN Business and Economics) and is the Editor-in-Chief of Econometrics. He has published extensively in leading academic journals such as Journal of International Money and Finance, Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Empirical Finance, Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions & Money, International Journal of Finance and Economics, European Journal of Finance, International Review of Financial Analysis, Economics Letters, Finance Research Letters, Journal of Time Series Analysis, Journal of Financial Econometrics, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Econometric Reviews, Journal of Forecasting, Journal of Economic Psychology, Review of International Economics, Canadian Journal of Economics, Journal of Macroeconomics, Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, International Review of Economics and Finance, Empirical Economics, Journal of Economics and Finance and several others. Qualifications: Phd Economics (LSE) MSc Economics (LSE) Laurea (Politics, LUISS, Rome)

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Project last modified 29/06/2021