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The migration determinants of graduates are of particular importance for the analysis of regional activities and thus influence city resilience in areas after the COVID-19 pandemic. By constructing a unique dataset from an online recruiting platform , we introduce a new measure of mobility intentions. We also apply the stacked difference-in-differences model to tackle the limitation of staggered treatments with a non-absorbing state brought about by lockdown policies. By comparing intention changes in cities with lockdown regulations to those without such regulations, we conclude that lockdown does influences the decisions of graduates and alter the attractiveness of cities mainly through panic job searching and recruiting digitalization. In a big picture, lockdown causally reduces graduates' mobility intentions by 0.7 %, but this intention increases by 1.2 % after lockdown is lifted. Lockdown policies also affect non-lockdown cities, particularly in cities that are less competitive and those that are in close geographical proximity. We further estimate the effects of lockdown duration and intensity on graduates' mobility intentions and find that full-scale lockdown increases intentions by 2.5 %, whereas partial lockdown increases intentions by only 0.9 %. This study fills the gap between the mobility literature and the COVID-19 literature by establishing the clean lockdown effects on graduate mobility intentions. • Lockdowns change the attractiveness of no locked-down cities to graduate migrants • New graduates cope with the anxiety from lockdowns by engaging in panic job searching • Graduates boost online job searches to offset lost offline recruitment during lockdowns • A data-driven analytical paper uses the large-scale human behavior data to quantify migration intention [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic, an exceptional crisis, sparked the introduction of new digital infrastructure to halt the novel coronavirus's spread. This paper explores how such digital infrastructure's impact might reverberate over the long term, by comparing Singapore, Hong Kong, and mainland China's utilization of digital technology in response to the 2003 SARS outbreak, and their responses to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. We find that advancements in digital technology since 2003 have boosted governments' surveillance and segregation abilities substantially—most dramatically so in China. Even though some of these new digital interventions are ostensibly designed to be temporary ones to address the needs of the immediate crisis, we argue that the resultant extensions of state power experienced during COVID-19 are likely to have profound long-term effects because they fundamentally affect sociopolitical contexts, institutional capabilities, and digital cultures. We also find that the extent to which governments can extend digital surveillance and segregation abilities during the pandemic is contingent on their respective sociopolitical, institutional, and digital cultural contexts. • COVID-19 pandemic sparked calls for a new digital infrastructure. • We compare 2003 SARS outbreak to COVID-19 pandemic. • New digital technologies increased governments' ability to surveil and segregate. • Their impact on surveillance and segregation will persist post COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]