Terror and Tourism: The Economic Consequences of Media Coverage

Timothy Besley, Thiemo Fetzer and Hannes Mueller

CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)

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.

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Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara and nep-tur
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/c ... /449-2019_fetzer.pdf

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 (2020)
Working Paper: Terror and Tourism: The Economic Consequences of Media Coverage (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cge:wacage:449

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