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Does television terrify tourists? Effects of US television news on demand for tourism in Israel

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Abstract

We analyze the impact on US tourist flows to Israel of variations in both the actual intensity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the intensity implicit in US television news coverage. Conditional on actual events, changes in reported conflict intensity could influence tourists because alternative sources of information are costly; this explanation is consistent with a rational choice model. However, television news could influence tourist behavior because of its emotional impact, or because it causes the conflict to be brought to mind more readily, increasing the subjective probability of conflict events. We find that tourists respond to variations in actual Israeli casualties and reported Palestinian casualties; both effects are large. Reports of Israeli casualties and unreported Palestinian casualties have no significant impact on tourist flows. These asymmetries are consistent with asymmetric information costs within a rational choice framework, but are more difficult to square with the alternative explanations for media influence.

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Notes

  1. Survey evidence indicates that American attitudes towards the risk of extreme political violence exhibit biases inconsistent with simple Expected Utility models. See Fischhoff et al. (2003) and Viscusi and Zeckhauser (2003).

  2. By contrast, Burger and Sturm (2005) construct a model of the German macro-economy conditional on the number of German television media reports of conflicts around the world. However, they do not compare this with a model using actual data from the conflicts that are partially reported.

  3. Equation (1) includes lags of the dependent variable up to 2; higher lags are theoretically possible, but turn out to be statistically insignificant in all cases we consider.

  4. NY = 1 if either Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur occur in the month; otherwise NY = 0.

  5. One disadvantage of our data is that they include business visitors in the total. However, no appropriately disaggregated data are available at a frequency higher than once every two months.

  6. The B’Tselem data do not cover violence along the Lebanese border, but this area does not attract such a large proportion of the foreign tourist market as it does of the domestic one.

  7. The dummy variable for March 2002 is omitted from the model when the 2001-004 sample is used, because it is collinear with the seasonal effects.

  8. This figure is significant in the light of the Gaza conflict of January 2009, which is outside of our sample period. The IDF prevented foreign journalists from entering Gaza, but Palestinian casualties were widely reported anyway.

  9. We also explored the effect of replacing our measure of the number of American tourists visiting Israel with the number of American tourist person nights (indicating the number of tourists in Israel times the number of nights they stayed); this time series is also available on the CBS website. The correlation between the two alternative dependent variables is 0.98. The results using the alternative dependent variable are very similar to the ones reported here; the main difference is in the ln(1 + PLK WNT ) coefficients, which are about 3–4 percentage points smaller, but still significant at the 5% level.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    David Fielding

  2. Department of Economics, Brunel University, London, England

    Anja Shortland

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  1. David Fielding
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  2. Anja Shortland
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Correspondence to David Fielding.

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Fielding, D., Shortland, A. Does television terrify tourists? Effects of US television news on demand for tourism in Israel. J Risk Uncertain 38, 245–263 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11166-009-9067-z

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