Environmental regulations and firm-level FDI: Evidence from China's 11th 5-year plan

Abstract

This paper investigates the influence of environmental regulations on outward foreign direct investment (OFDI). We first develop a simple model to show that an increase in emission tax in the domestic market induces firm-level foreign direct investment (FDI) activities. We next take advantage of China's 11th Five-Year Plan as a quasi-natural experiment, which imposed different pollution reduction targets across provinces, and examine its impact on firm-level FDI activities. Our results indicate that more stringent environmental regulations encourage firm-level FDI participation. Furthermore, (1) firms are more likely to carry out FDI in developing countries instead of developed ones; (2) Compared with distribution-oriented FDI, firms are more likely to engage in production-oriented FDI. All results remain robust after controlling for possible policy endogeneity, missing variables, and expectation effect issues, which provides positive support for the pollution haven hypothesis.