Vive le Tour!? Estimating the place-based benefits of hosting the Tour de France

The Tour de France (TdF) is one of the biggest and most recognized annual sporting events in the world. Cities and regions participate actively by hosting a stage start and/or finish, but it is unclear if there are place-based benefits from such local engagements. We estimate the direct and spatially indirect immediate regional benefits of hosting a TdF stage using monthly tourism data for French départements during 2011–2020. Our static and dynamic panel regressions indicate that hosting a TdF stage leads to significant increases in tourist arrivals and nights spent vis-à-vis similar départements not hosting a stage at the same time. Results are found to be robust when we run placebo tests, matching-based estimation to deal with regional heterogeneity and associated treatment endogeneity as well as spatially augmented estimations to account for interregional spillovers to départements not directly hosting a stage start/finish, for example, to those located along the route of a TdF stage. We use the obtained treatment estimates to discuss the regional economic impact of the TdF and their ramifications for tourism-based regional development and event management.