title: The impact of tourism on urban areas
Creators: name: Hidalgo Escudero, Alberto
Publisher: name: IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca
publisherIdentifier: https://ror.org/035gh3a49
publisherIdentifierScheme: ROR
Year: 2024

description: This doctoral dissertation is divided into three chapters. All of them deal with aspects related to the the impact of tourism on urban areas, but each one has a distinct topic and puts its focus on a specific standpoint. The effect of Short-Term Rental on Local Consumption Amenities: Evidence from Madrid This paper examines the impact of the arrival of Airbnb on local consumption amenities in Madrid. We exploit the exogenous variation created by the timing and uneven distribution of Airbnb listings in the city to determine the impact on food and beverage establishments. Using an instrumental variable strategy, we find positive local effects on both the number of restaurants and their employees: an increase of fourteen Airbnb rooms in a given census tract leads to almost one more restaurant, and the same increase in a given neighborhood generates eleven new tourist-related employees. The results are robust to the specification and sample composition. This paper contributes to the literature on the economic impact of the platform economy on urban areas by providing evidence of market expansion externalities from short-term rentals. This paper has been published in the Journal of Regional Science. When Local Business Faded Away: The Uneven Impact of Airbnb on the Geography of Economic Activities This paper investigates the unequal effect of Airbnb on the spatial organisation of economic activity in Madrid, Spain. Using establishment-level data from Madrid City Council and consumer-facing information from this short-term rental company, we find that Airbnb reshapes the urban space by encouraging tourist-oriented businesses, defined as businesses where tourists spend more than locals, at the expense of businesses primarily oriented to locals. These findings prove that short-term rentals do displace not only the local population but also resident-oriented businesses. Eventually, we show that our results are not driven by the method of measuring digital accommodation activity, other touristic actors, and confounders related to gentrification and the rise of online purchasing. This paper has been published in the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society. Your Room is Ready: Tourism and Urban Revival Tourism is an essential sector of the global economy, contributing significantly to GDP and employment. Despite its importance, our understanding of its impact on urban economic activity remains limited. This paper aims to fill this gap by examining the impact of tourism on urban transformation using a dataset of hotel openings in Madrid from 2001-2010. I show that hotel openings positively impact the number of establishments and employment by using the number of protected buildings as an instrumental variable to account for the non-random distribution of hotel openings. Interestingly, hotel openings contribute to changes in the composition of the economic activities and the business structures, enhancing touristoriented corporate-owned businesses over other individual-owned companies. Finally, economic effects extend to the real estate market, increasing rental prices and residential investment. This paper is a solo coauthor paper and my Job Market Paper.