Small events, big impact: Can rural sports event IP generate county-level tourism dividends? Evidence from “Village BA” in Taijiang County, China

Small-scale rural sports events are increasingly used as tools for regional regeneration, yet counterfactual evidence on whether they generate sustained tourism benefits at the county level remains limited. This study examines the rapid rise of “Village BA” in Taijing County, Guizhou, China, as a quasi-experimental setting. Using county-level panel data from 2015 to 2024, we estimate tourism responses associated with the post-2022 Village BA-centered expansion by combining the synthetic control method, synthetic difference-in-differences, and a matching-weighted two-way fixed-effects model. Across the baseline specifications, the estimated effects are positive for both outcomes, although their inferential profiles differ across estimators and robustness settings. First, the estimated effects in 2023–2024 are generally larger than those in the 2022 breakout stage, indicating a sustained post-breakout tourism response. Second, tourist-visitor estimates are comparatively more directionally stable across estimators and sensitivity specifications, whereas baseline tourism-revenue effects become more pronounced and more precisely estimated during the later institutional-expansion stage, a pattern broadly consistent with a relative “flows first, returns later” interpretation. SCM placebo rankings do not reach conventional significance levels, while SDID and matching-weighted TWFE provide alternative assessments of statistical precision. Sensitivity analyses further show that tourism-revenue estimates are more sensitive to estimator choice and the treatment of the COVID-affected pre-treatment years. These findings provide counterfactual evidence of county-level tourism gains associated with the Village BA-centered expansion, while the underlying mechanisms remain theory-grounded rather than directly identified.