Bitcoin attention and economic policy uncertainty

Abstract

This paper explores the role of Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) as driver of the Bitcoin public attention. Using Google trends data from January 2010 to November 2021 in a set of 22 countries, a Principal Components Analysis reveals a strong unique commonality on the internet searching patterns for Bitcoin across countries, which suggests that the potential explaining factors of the Bitcoin attention should be global instead of local. The multivariate analysis corroborates this hypothesis since EPU at the country level does not play a significant role in explaining the searching patterns on Google for Bitcoin, while the global EPU does.