IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/empeco/v63y2022i6d10.1007_s00181-022-02228-2.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The impact of TV series on tourism performance: the case of Game of Thrones

Author

Listed:
  • Giulia Contu

    (University of Cagliari)

  • Sara Pau

    (University of Cagliari)

Abstract

TV series and cinema productions are considered one of the most recent and promising instruments to promote tourist destinations and to increase tourist flows. However, a few papers analyze empirically their impact on tourist choices. We contribute to the scarce literature by investigating the impact of one of the most successful TV series of all times: Game of Thrones (GoT). The series was internationally broadcasted and filmed around the world. We focus on fourteen filming locations in three different countries: Spain, Croatia and Malta. To estimate how much of their recent tourism performance is due to the visibility obtained through GoT, we use county-level panel data in the years 2007–2019 and apply an event study design as methodology. We deal with the issue of treatment effect heterogeneity over time and across counties by adopting an interaction-weighted estimator which focuses on season-specific treatment effect. The results show a positive and persistent impact of GoT on tourism performance, on both new tourist arrivals and overnight stays, and are not driven by spillover effects. Overall, findings confirm the ability of TV productions to boost the tourist flows in the filming locations.

Suggested Citation

  • Giulia Contu & Sara Pau, 2022. "The impact of TV series on tourism performance: the case of Game of Thrones," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 63(6), pages 3313-3341, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:empeco:v:63:y:2022:i:6:d:10.1007_s00181-022-02228-2
    DOI: 10.1007/s00181-022-02228-2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00181-022-02228-2
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s00181-022-02228-2?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Simon Freyaldenhoven & Christian Hansen & Jesse M. Shapiro, 2019. "Pre-event Trends in the Panel Event-Study Design," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 109(9), pages 3307-3338, September.
    2. Clément de Chaisemartin & Xavier D'Haultfœuille, 2020. "Two-Way Fixed Effects Estimators with Heterogeneous Treatment Effects," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 110(9), pages 2964-2996, September.
    3. Stephen J. Redding & Daniel M. Sturm, 2008. "The Costs of Remoteness: Evidence from German Division and Reunification," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 98(5), pages 1766-1797, December.
    4. Rinaldo Brau & Anna Maria Pinna, 2013. "Movements of People for Movements of Goods?," The World Economy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 36(10), pages 1318-1332, October.
    5. Eva Martin-Fuentes & Jorge Nieto Ferrando & Estela Marine-Roig & Berta Ferrer-Rosell, 2020. "From Blockbuster to Neighbourhood Buster: The Effect of Films on Barcelona," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(6), pages 1-16, March.
    6. Connell, Joanne, 2012. "Film tourism – Evolution, progress and prospects," Tourism Management, Elsevier, vol. 33(5), pages 1007-1029.
    7. Goodman-Bacon, Andrew, 2021. "Difference-in-differences with variation in treatment timing," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 225(2), pages 254-277.
    8. Martha J. Bailey & Andrew Goodman-Bacon, 2015. "The War on Poverty's Experiment in Public Medicine: Community Health Centers and the Mortality of Older Americans," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 105(3), pages 1067-1104, March.
    9. Gjorgievski, Mijalce & Melles Trpkova, Sinolicka, 2012. "Movie Induced Tourism: A New Tourism Phenomenon," UTMS Journal of Economics, University of Tourism and Management, Skopje, Macedonia, vol. 3(1), pages 97-104.
    10. Raffaele Paci & Emanuela Marrocu, 2014. "Tourism and regional growth in Europe," Papers in Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 93, pages 25-50, November.
    11. Betsey Stevenson & Justin Wolfers, 2006. "Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law: Divorce Laws and Family Distress," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 121(1), pages 267-288.
    12. Craig A. Depken & Tomislav Globan & Ivan Kožić, 2020. "Television-Induced Tourism: Evidence from Croatia," Atlantic Economic Journal, Springer;International Atlantic Economic Society, vol. 48(2), pages 253-262, June.
    13. Sun, Liyang & Abraham, Sarah, 2021. "Estimating dynamic treatment effects in event studies with heterogeneous treatment effects," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 225(2), pages 175-199.
    14. Maria Luisa Cortón & Maling Ebrahimpour, 2014. "Research Note: Forecasting Film-Induced Tourism — The Dolphin Tale Case," Tourism Economics, , vol. 20(6), pages 1349-1356, December.
    15. Kyle Butts, 2021. "Difference-in-Differences Estimation with Spatial Spillovers," Papers 2105.03737, arXiv.org, revised Jun 2023.
    16. Justin Wolfers, 2006. "Did Unilateral Divorce Laws Raise Divorce Rates? A Reconciliation and New Results," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(5), pages 1802-1820, December.
    17. Callaway, Brantly & Sant’Anna, Pedro H.C., 2021. "Difference-in-Differences with multiple time periods," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 225(2), pages 200-230.
    18. Case, Anne C. & Rosen, Harvey S. & Hines, James Jr., 1993. "Budget spillovers and fiscal policy interdependence : Evidence from the states," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 52(3), pages 285-307, October.
    19. Wadim Strielkowski, 2017. "Promoting Tourism Destination through Film-Induced Tourism: The Case of Japan," Tržište/Market, Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Zagreb, vol. 29(2), pages 193-203.
    20. Christine Lim, 1997. "An Econometric Classification and Review of International Tourism Demand Models," Tourism Economics, , vol. 3(1), pages 69-81, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ryo Takahashi, 2024. "From the Holy Land to the Homeland: The Impact of Anime Broadcasts on Economic Growth," Working Papers 2402, Waseda University, Faculty of Political Science and Economics.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Cl'ement de Chaisemartin & Xavier D'Haultf{oe}uille, 2021. "Two-Way Fixed Effects and Differences-in-Differences with Heterogeneous Treatment Effects: A Survey," Papers 2112.04565, arXiv.org, revised Jun 2022.
    2. Clément de Chaisemartin & Xavier D’Haultfœuille, 2023. "Two-way fixed effects and differences-in-differences with heterogeneous treatment effects: a survey," The Econometrics Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 26(3), pages 1-30.
    3. Roth, Jonathan & Sant’Anna, Pedro H.C. & Bilinski, Alyssa & Poe, John, 2023. "What’s trending in difference-in-differences? A synthesis of the recent econometrics literature," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 235(2), pages 2218-2244.
    4. Peter Blair & Elijah Neilson, 2023. "Divorce and Property Division Laws Shape Human Capital Investment," Working Papers 2023-020, Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group.
    5. Simon Freyaldenhoven & Christian Hansen & Jorge Perez Perez & Jesse Shapiro, 2021. "Visualization, Identification, and stimation in the Linear Panel Event-Study Design," Working Papers 21-44, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
    6. Kurt Schmidheiny & Sebastian Siegloch, 2023. "On event studies and distributed‐lags in two‐way fixed effects models: Identification, equivalence, and generalization," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 38(5), pages 695-713, August.
    7. Elisabetta Calabresi, 2024. "“Don’t Leave Me Alone†: Unilateral Divorce and Intimate Partner Violence," Working Papers - Economics wp2024_17.rdf, Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Dipartimento di Scienze per l'Economia e l'Impresa.
    8. Esra Kose & Siobhan M. O'Keefe & Maria Rosales-Rueda, 2022. "Does the Delivery of Primary Health Care Improve Birth Outcomes? Evidence from the Rollout of Community Health Centers," NBER Working Papers 30047, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    9. Wang, Zhen & Chu, Erming, 2024. "The path toward urban carbon neutrality: How does the low-carbon city pilot policy stimulate low-carbon technology?," Economic Analysis and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 82(C), pages 954-975.
    10. Myungkou Shin, 2022. "Finitely Heterogeneous Treatment Effect in Event-study," Papers 2204.02346, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2024.
    11. Bhalotra, Sonia R. & Britto, Diogo & Pinotti, Paolo & Sampaio, Breno, 2021. "Job Displacement, Unemployment Benefits and Domestic Violence," IZA Discussion Papers 14543, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    12. John McHale & Jason Harold & Jen-Chung Mei & Akhil Sasidharan & Anil Yadav, 2023. "Stars as catalysts: an event-study analysis of the impact of star-scientist recruitment on local research performance in a small open economy," Journal of Economic Geography, Oxford University Press, vol. 23(2), pages 343-369.
    13. Goodman-Bacon, Andrew, 2021. "Difference-in-differences with variation in treatment timing," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 225(2), pages 254-277.
    14. Li, Ping & Zhang, ZhongXiang, 2023. "The effects of new energy vehicle subsidies on air quality: Evidence from China," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 120(C).
    15. Sutirtha Bagchi & Libor Dušek, 2021. "Third-party Reporting and Tax Collections: Evidence from the Introduction of Withholding of the State Personal Income Tax," Villanova School of Business Department of Economics and Statistics Working Paper Series 50, Villanova School of Business Department of Economics and Statistics.
    16. Santiago Garriga & Dario Tortarolo, 2024. "Wage effects of means-tested transfers: Incidence implications of using firms as intermediaries," IFS Working Papers W24/49, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    17. Dong, Xinwei, 2022. "Intrahousehold property ownership, women’s bargaining power, and family structure," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 78(C).
    18. Marein, Brian, 2023. "Public health departments and the mortality transition in Latin America: Evidence from Puerto Rico," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 160(C).
    19. Riccardo Ciacci, 2023. "On the economic determinants of prostitution: marriage compensation and unilateral divorce in U.S. states," Review of Economics of the Household, Springer, vol. 21(3), pages 941-1017, September.
    20. Sarah Gust, 2024. "(Not) Going to School in Times of Climate Change: Natural Disasters and Student Achievement," ifo Working Paper Series 413, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:empeco:v:63:y:2022:i:6:d:10.1007_s00181-022-02228-2. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.