City Marathon Events and Tourism Industry: A Quasi-Natural Experiment

Building the relationship between marathon events and tourism is a significant strategy for the local governments. However, there has been little agreement on the effect of city marathon events on local tourism performance. Therefore, this research gap is addressed by providing empirical evidence for the effect of city marathon events on local tourism performance. First, the paper analyzes the theoretical mechanism of the effect of city marathon events on tourism from three aspects: the preliminary effect before marathon events, the agglomeration effect during marathon events, and the legacy effect after marathon events. Second, taking the city marathon events in China as a quasi-natural experiment, the paper uses the Difference-in-Difference model to identify the effect of the marathon events on tourism based on the panel data of 50 major tourist cities from 2010 to 2017. The results indicate that city marathon events significantly boost local tourism performance. These research findings are further confirmed by performing various robustness checks.