This Friday, January 27, UHERO Research Fellow Sumner LaCroix will present “How Big? The Impact of Approved Destination Status on Mainland Chinese Travel”.
The seminar will be take place at University of Hawaii, Saunders 515, from 3:00 – 4:15PM.
Abstract: China’s Approved Destination Status (ADS) policy governs foreign leisure travel by its residents who are allowed to travel abroad on group package tours to ADS-designated countries. To model the effects of ADS on Chinese visitor arrivals to early ADS recipients, we specify a CES demand model for a representative Chinese consumer who values trips to n differentiated foreign destinations. We estimate a regression derived from our model using fixed effects for our full sample and for a sample on common support. We then compare with results from a semiparametric matched difference-in-differences (DID) model. The semiparametric matched DID estimates indicate that Chinese visitor arrivals typically increased by 7.6 to 15.1 percent in the three-year period following ADS designation.