City Marathon Events and Tourism Industry: A Quasi-Natural Experiment.

This article investigates the impact of city marathon events on local tourism performance, addressing a research gap through empirical analysis using panel data from 50 major tourist cities in China between 2010 and 2017. Employing the Difference-in-Difference (DID) model, the study finds that hosting city marathon events significantly increases inbound overnight tourist arrivals, with an average annual boost of approximately 100,000 tourists per host city. The paper develops a theoretical framework explaining this effect through three stages: the "preliminary effect" (marketing before the event), the "agglomeration effect" (tourist influx during the event), and the "legacy effect" (long-term tourism benefits after the event). Robustness checks, including parallel trends and counterfactual tests, support the validity of these findings. The study concludes that city marathon events serve as an effective and relatively low-threshold strategy for local governments to enhance regional tourism performance.