TY  - JOUR
AU  - Dupont,Brandon
AU  - Gandhi,Alka
AU  - Weiss,Thomas J.
TI  - The American Invasion of Europe: The Long Term Rise in Overseas Travel, 1820-2000
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13977
PY  - 2008
Y2  - May 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13977
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13977.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Brandon Dupont
Department of Economics
Western Washington University
Parks Hall 206B
516 High Street
Bellingham, WA 98225
E-Mail: brandon.dupont@wwu.edu

Alka Gandhi
Department of Economics
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
Tel: 570-321-4154
E-Mail: Gandhi@econ.umd.edu

Thomas J. Weiss
Department of Economics
University of Kansas
Lawrence, KS  66045
Tel: 785/840-6878
Fax:  785/864-5270
E-Mail: t-weiss@ku.edu
AB  - Tourism today is an activity of substantial economic importance worldwide, and has been for some time. Tourism is also of substantial economic importance in the United States, sufficient to warrant the Bureau of Economic Analysis's establishing special accounts on travel and tourism.  In this paper we investigate the long term rise in overseas travel by Americans.  Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the number of Americans going abroad rose from less than 2,000 travelers to over 26 million.  The industry went from one confined to the elite of American society to what some have described as mass tourism.  We document this rise by compiling a long term series on overseas travel, and describe the changes in the composition of the travelers, their destinations, and their mode of travel.  We use an Error Correction Model to explain how the increase came about.
ER  -