Windfall money and outbound tourism: A natural experiment from lottery winnings

David Boto-García, Alvaro Muñiz-Fernández and Levi Pérez
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Levi Pérez

Tourism Economics, 2024, vol. 30, issue 5, 1257-1280

Abstract: Income is a relevant factor for explaining outbound tourism demand. However, when working with regional- or country-level data, it is difficult to disentangle the role of income in stimulating tourism travelling from other factors that correlate with greater income levels. This paper exploits a natural experiment from Spanish Christmas Lottery to estimate the causal effect of income shocks on outbound tourism. We leverage the staggered and quasi-random assignment of lottery winnings across Spanish regions to estimate the elasticity of outbound annual trips and expenditure to windfall gains. Using difference-in-differences with the amount of lottery prizes as an indicator of treatment intensity, we show that lottery winnings per capita increase both the annual number of tourism trips and expenditure per capita. This effect operates during the first 2Â years following the draw, which is likely explained by bandwagon and income multiplier effects.

Keywords: windfall money; natural experiment; income shock; outbound tourism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13548166231203042 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:toueco:v:30:y:2024:i:5:p:1257-1280

DOI: 10.1177/13548166231203042

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Tourism Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().