Abstract
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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Journal of Regional Science |
| Volume | 63 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1131-1161 |
| ISSN | 0022-4146 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Nov 2023 |
Keywords
- cycling
- large-scale sporting events
- regional economic impact
- Tour de France
- tourism