Does the World Heritage Site inscription enhance city tourism attractiveness? New evidence from migration big data on China’s national holidays

This paper contributes to providing causal evidence on the effect of World Heritage Site (WHS) inscription on city tourism attractiveness, which is still highly elusive in the existing literature. To identify the causal effect, it uses unique daily city-pair tourist flows from Tencent migration big data on two Chinese national holidays between 2015 and 2019. We document that WHS inscription does raise city tourism attractiveness. One more WHS leads to an increase in the tourist inflow intensity by at least 6.7% up to around 10%. The tourism-enhancing effect is consistent under many robustness checks and displays some notable heterogeneity effects in terms of holiday types, days within each holiday, high-speed rail connection, and newly-inscribed WHS cities.