Abstract
This paper analyzes the extent to which the filming of the popular television show Game of Thrones affected tourism in the Croatian city of Dubrovnik. Using monthly data and applying difference-in-differences, the study shows that the impact of airing Game of Thrones episodes filmed in Dubrovnik corresponded to approximately 5000 additional tourism overnights per month, or approximately 59,000 per year. Existing results were extended to show that the additional overnights mainly occur during the tourism off-season when transportation and lodging prices are ostensibly lower, consistent with anecdotal evidence. The results provide another example that the filming of a television show can increase the attractiveness of an already well-established and globally-known destination. The results are especially useful for tourism industries in countries with highly seasonal tourism activities, like Croatia, that usually depend on beneficial climatic conditions, which are highly unpredictable and volatile. Filming of popular television shows and increased tourism may provide additional revenue for local economies and help smooth seasonal and yearly volatility of local income.
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Notes
The city of Split was not included because it is a much larger city than the four included here and there are potentially confounding cultural and musical events that are held regularly in the city starting in the middle of the sample period and attract large number of guests, such as the Ultra Europe music festival.
The data are available from the Croatian Bureau of Statistics (2002-2014) in the annual publication Tourism in Seaside Resorts and Municipalities, an example of which can be downloaded at www.dzs.hr/Hrv_Eng/publication/2014/SI-1516.pdf [accessed 10 June 2020]. Unfortunately, at the time of writing of the revised version of the paper, the reports for the period before 2010 were no longer available online.
As pointed out by Cameron and Miller (2015), the appropriate degrees of freedom for t-tests with clustered standard errors is G-1 where G is the number of clusters. In this case, G-1 = 3 and, therefore, the appropriate critical value is 3.182.
The results of this auxiliary model are available from the authors upon request.
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Acknowledgements
This paper has been partially supported by the Croatian Science Foundation under the project no. 6785.
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Depken, C.A., Globan, T. & Kožić, I. Television-Induced Tourism: Evidence from Croatia. Atl Econ J 48, 253–262 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11293-020-09673-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11293-020-09673-3