Environmental regulation and outward foreign direct investment: Evidence from China

This paper explores the impact of environmental regulation (ER) on outward foreign direct investment (FDI) flows in China. During the period from 2013 to 2015, all Chinese cities were required to join a nationwide automatic air quality monitoring network in batches, and this policy exogenously raised local environmental regulation. This unique policy implemented full coverage through a staggered adoption, which motivates this paper to apply an event study approach to identify the treatment effect of stringent environmental regulation. Based on a city-year level capital outflows dataset constructed from the fDi Markets database, we obtain three main findings: (1) environmental regulation significantly stimulates outward FDI flows; (2) this promoting effect centers on polluting industries; and (3) these ER-induced FDI outflows are mainly directed toward countries with weaker environmental protection and with a closer geographic and cultural distance to the home country. These results together provide a snapshot confirming the classical “pollution haven hypothesis”. •Environmental regulation (ER) can significantly motivate the capital outflows of polluting industries in China.•ER-induced outward FDI flows are more likely to relocate to foreign countries with weaker environmental regulation.•ER-induced FDI outflows prefer host countries with a smaller geographic and cultural distance to the home country.