Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP14275
Authors: Timothy J. Besley; Thiemo Fetzer; Hannes Felix Mueller
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.
Keywords: No keywords provided
JEL Codes: D83; F14; D74; L82; F15; H12
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| violent events (D74) | negative media reporting (G14) |
| negative media reporting (G14) | contractions in tourist activity (Z39) |
| media coverage of violence (L82) | tourist spending (Z33) |
| media reporting intensity (C59) | drops in tourism activity (Z30) |
| violent events (D74) | drops in tourism activity (Z30) |
| media coverage (L82) | economic impact of violent events on tourism activity (Z30) |