Foreign land acquisitions and environmental regulations: Does the pollution‐haven effect hold?
研究了投资国与目标国环境规制差异如何影响外国土地收购，发现差异越大，投资企业越多，且影响受目标国腐败程度等因素调节。
Abstract The recent wave of foreign land acquisitions (FLA) has raised several concerns in terms of their environmental and social sustainability. An unexplored issue is whether pollution‐haven mechanisms are driving the pattern of FLA. This paper investigates whether and how differences in environmental stringency between investing and target country affect the pattern of FLA. We estimate a panel gravity equation and use different indexes to measure the environmental stringency. Our results show that, by and large, differences in environmental stringency do affect FLA. The wider the gap in the environmental stringency between the investor and the target country, the higher is the number of firms investing abroad. Our results also show that the impact of environmental stringency differentials on FLA depends on the investor country and on corruption in the target country, and that in a number of estimations the choice over the index of stringency may be a relevant factor.