The role of museums in bilateral tourist flows: evidence from Italy
利用意大利20个大区的双边旅游流和博物馆数据，通过多种计量方法估计博物馆供给对国内旅游流的因果效应，发现博物馆数量对旅游流有显著正向影响。
This paper estimates the causal relationship of supply of art on domestic tourist flows. To this aim, we use aggregate bilateral data on tourist flows and various data on museums in the twenty Italian regions. To solve the potential endogeneity of the supply of museums, we use three different empirical strategies: we use a fixed effects model controlling for bilateral macro-area dummies, we compute the degree of selection on unobservables relative to observables which would be necessary to drive the result to zero and, finally, we adopt a two-stage least squares approach that uses a measure of historical patronage, the number of noble families, as an instrument for the number of museums. For each empirical strategy, there is strong evidence of a positive effect of the number of ‘net-museums’ on bilateral tourist flows.