Date of Award

6-2022

Document Type

Open Access

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Economics

First Advisor

Lewis Davis

Keywords

Bitcoin, Approval, Presidential, President, Disapproval, Ratings, Returns

Abstract

There has been a growing fascination for decentralized electronic assets, and Bitcoin has emerged as the face and leader of the movement. There have been three different presidents coinciding with the growth of Bitcoin. Since the creation of Bitcoin, each president has faced periods of net disapproval, and these periods have been the norm throughout Obama’s, Trump’s, and Biden’s presidencies. There is currently no existing literature on Presidential ratings as a predictor of Bitcoin, however, there has been research on the predictors of Bitcoin and Presidential ratings as a predictor of financial markets. I hypothesized that increases in net disapproval ratings will be a predictor of increases in the returns of Bitcoin because when people do not trust the government they are less likely to trust financial institutions and thus more likely to invest in a decentralized asset like Bitcoin. I run OLS regressions with daily, weekly and monthly data to test whether changes in net presidential approval ratings are a predictor of the excess returns of Bitcoin one month later. I add stock market, political, and Cryptocurrency investor sentiment control variables as robustness tests. I find that net presidential disapproval ratings as a predictor of Bitcoin are unique to each president. Under Daily and weekly frequencies, my results show that changes in net disapproval had a nearly no effect, during Biden’s presidency, A positive effect during Trump’s term, and a negative effect during Obama’s regime, on Bitcoin’s excess return one month later.

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Rights Statement

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted.