Reporting on violence draws attention to countries not typically covered by international news outlets. This leads to a ‘bad news’ bias, which can affect not only how people view these countries, but whether they choose to visit.
Using aggregated spending data to proxy tourist activity, Tim Besley (LSE), Thiemo Fetzer (Warwick), and Hannes Mueller (IAE-CSIC and BSE) document a robust relationship between the intensity of reporting on violence and subsequent drops in tourist spending, suggesting that a bad news bias can have serious economic consequences for the countries that suffer from it.
