On the negative impact of time zone differences on international tourism

This research note reports novel results on the negative effect of time zone differences on international tourism in a global sample of countries over the period 1995–2013. A gravity-type model, which has become standard in international tourism demand, is estimated with Pseudo-Poisson maximum likelihood, controlling for geographical distance and other potential confounders at the dyadic level in addition to origin-year and destination-year fixed effects. The effect of time zone differences is found to be substantively strong and approximately (log-)linear across the various hours of time zone difference, with an average negative effect of about 11.6% per hour of time difference.