Terror and Tourism: The Economic Consequences of Media Coverage

Timothy Besley, Thiemo Fetzer and Hannes Mueller

No 1141, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: We combine monthly aggregated and anonymized credit card data on tourism spending from 114 origin countries in 5 tourist destinations (Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, Israel and Morocco) with a large corpus of news coverage of violent events. This allows us to separate the effect of events at the destination from the effect of news reporting at the origin of cardholders. We develop a model of tourist beliefs, actual violence and news coverage to quantify the effect of coverage. When a country is perceived as dangerous, aggregate spending falls by 55 percent. More than half of this effect comes from media coverage.

Keywords: tourism; media bias; availability heuristics; mortality risk; terror; armed violence; supervised machine learning; economic integration; random forest (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F1 F5 L8 O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara, nep-big and nep-tur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Terror and Tourism: The Economic Consequences of Media Coverage (2020)
Working Paper: Terror and Tourism: The Economic Consequences of Media Coverage (2019)
Working Paper: Terror and Tourism: The Economic Consequences of Media Coverage (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bge:wpaper:1141

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