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Risk management is one of the most dynamically developed areas in economic sciences. One of the main driving forces for this development has been the practical challenge resulting from increasing financial risk. Risk management is a process in which key role is played by risk measurement (Jajuga, 2016). Comparison of various forecasting models and selection of the best ones for particular markets is of key importance in many fields of economics and finance. Theoretic aspects concerning commodity markets very often concentrate on relations between changes in commodity prices and on the news impact on rates of return. However, up until now studies concerning conditional volatility of returns on commodity markets and market risk have been less comprehensive than those concerning conditions affecting prices and rates of return. Nevertheless, studies concerning market volatility are becoming increasingly popular due to the growth of market volatility itself and the significance of commodities as investment assets (Kang, 2013; Thuraisamy, 2013; Vivian, 2012). The growing interest also results from the fact that commodity rates of return have some empirically verifiable features such as non-normal distribution, asymmetry, structural breaks and fat tails (Aloui, 2010; Cheng, 2011).

Population migration continues to be a current topic linked to a wide spectrum of various external and internal factors on both international and regional levels. In contemporary literature, there is a whole score of empirical studies that deal with international migration, its determinants and impacts on the economy. However, there are only few empirical studies that deal primarily with solely regional (i.e. internal) migration in comparison to the large number of studies analyzing international migration, which is one of the main reasons for the selection of the topic of this study and its focus on internal migration and thus on movements that take place within one geopolitical entity, usually a nationstate (for more on the definition of internal migration, see, e.g., Fendel, 2014; Royuela & Ordóñez, 2016). So-called “gravity models” stemming from an analogy to Newton’s law of gravity and Ravenstein’s laws of migration are often used for modelling internal migration and the study of it, or for the analysis of the main determinates that impact these internal fluctuations of citizens; however, these gravity models of migration are often criticized for their insufficient theoretical foundation.

Over the previous two decades, festivals have gained a prominent position within the world’s tourism and leisure industry. Festivals are regarded as an effective strategy for the promotion of the tourism industry and the local economy. Hosting a festival may attract tourists who otherwise would not choose to visit the destination and whose expenditures contribute to income and tax revenues in host communities (Getz & Page, 2016). Festivals and events facilitate the positioning of a locality as a tourism destination (Hudson et al., 2015) and can be effective tools in combating the seasonality of tourism demand (Tkaczynski & Rundle-Thiele, 2011; Yolal et al., 2016). Festivals play an important role in preserving cultural heritage and reinforce residents’ pride of being members of host community (Yolal et al., 2016; Yoon, Lee, & Lee, 2010). Due to a number of benefi ts brought by hosting festivals, signifi cant attention has been paid to festival studies over previous years. The vast majority of previous studies focused on the importance of visitors’ motives, dimensions of motivation and differences in the importance of motivational domains based on visitors’ socio-demographic characteristics, previous visitations, types of event being studied, etc. (Crompton & McKay, 1997; Kang et al., 2014; Lee, 2000).

The economy of China has been maintaining a middle and high growth rates in the past 40 years since reform and opening-up. Railway is an important infrastructure and a major factor of economic development. It is also a witness and beneficiary of reform and opening-up. Railway in China has undergone transformation and development. Given the continuous expansion of traffic network and innovative reform of technologies, high-speed rail construction has achieved outstanding progresses. During the “12th Five-Year Plan,” the total investment of China to high-speed rail system has exceeded 1,800 billion RMB. Moreover, 3,500 billion RMB of investment is expected under railway plan in the “13th Five-Year Plan.” Currently, China owns a high-speed rail network with the longest operation miles, the highest transportation density, and the most complicated network operation scenario in the world (Karolys et al., 2019).

The foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows have exhibited substantial increases with contri bution of relaxation of the impediments over the international flows of goods, services and capital mainly resulting from the accelerating liberalization and globalization as of 1980s. Consequently, international FDI inflows reached USD 3.111 trillion in 2007, but then contracted due to economic crises and the increasing protectionism concerns in the recent years and became USD 1.95 trillion in 2017 (World Bank, 2019a). The rapidly expanding FDI flows made the economic effects of FDI one of the muchdiscussed and studied topics in the international economics. On the one hand, the scholars have focused on the effect of FDI inflows on the economic growth, unemployment, total taxes, technological development, environmental degradation (see, e.g., Lasbrey et al., 2018).