How do Overnight Stays React to Exchange Rate Changes?a Christian Stettlerb JEL-Classification: F14, F31, E52, Z31 Keywords: Real Exchange Rate, Tourism, Overnight Stays, Swiss Franc, Switzerland. SUMMARY This paper analyses the effect of a change in the real exchange rate on the number of overnight stays in Swiss hotels. It uses unique three-dimensional panel data on the monthly number of overnight stays by the visitor’s country of origin in 141 Swiss communities during the ten-year period from January 2005 to December 2014. We find low exchange rate elasticities of 0.2 for cities, but much higher elasticities of 1.4 for touristic communities. On the source market side, we find large exchange rate elasticities for German, Dutch, and Belgian visitors, while travellers from France and Italy are less price sensitive. a I thank two anonymous referees and the editor for very insightful comments. I also thank Sophia Ding, Ugo Panizza, Janosch Weiss, Florian Egli, Wanlin Ren, Mark Hack, Michelle Cunningham, Sarah Haag, Elise Grieg, Etienne Michaud, and Martina Hengge for helpful comments. Lastly, I am very grateful to the Swiss Federal Statistical Office for providing the data. b Department of International Economics, The Graduate Institute of International and Devel- opment Studies, Maison de la Paix (Chemin Eugène-Rigot 2), Case Postale 136, 1211 Geneva 21, Switzerland; KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich, Leonhardstr. 21, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland. Email:
[email protected]. © Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics 2017, Vol. 153 (2) 123–165 124 Christian Stettler 1. Introduction Fears of the Swiss tourism industry loom large since January 15, 2015.