Terror and Tourism: The Economic Consequences of Media Coverage

Thiemo Fetzer, Timothy Besley and Hannes Mueller

No 14275, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: This paper studies the economic effects of news-coverage of violent events. To do so, we combine monthly aggregated and anonymized credit card data on tourism spending from 114 origin countries and 5 tourist destinations (Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, Israel and Morocco) with a large corpus of more than 446 thousand newspaper articles covering news on the 5 destination countries from a subset of 57 tourist origin countries. We document that violent events in a destination are followed by sharp spikes in negative reporting at origin and contractions in tourist activity. Media coverage of violence has a large independent effect on tourist spending beyond what can be accounted for by controlling for the incidence of violence. We develop a model in which tourist beliefs, actual violence and media reporting are modelled together. This model allows us to quantify the effect of violent events and reporting.

JEL-codes: D74 D83 F14 F15 H12 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara, nep-cul 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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