Abstract
This article takes advantage of the designation of top tourist cities in China to estimate the impact of quality disclosure on the city tourism economy. According to theories regarding quality disclosure and certification, we develop a tourism promotion hypothesis for the designation, which is then tested with panel data from China’s 284 prefectural-level cities between 2000 and 2015. The difference-in-differences approach shows that gaining the designation increases both domestic and inbound tourism revenues, which is robust to various specifications. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the tourism promotion effect only persists for about three years, decreases over time, is smaller in developed areas, and is less salient for multiple or county-level designations.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
