Environmental sustainability practices and offshoring activities of multinational corporations across emerging and developed markets

•Environmental sustainability practices and offshoring activities examined.•Multinational corporations across emerging and developed markets explored.•Sustainability practices effects on offshoring decisions.•The theoretical and policy implications are analyzed. Using panel data of 1080 multinational corporations (MNCs) from the United States, we examine the effects of environmental sustainability practices on the degree of firms’ offshoring activities. In addition, we disaggregate offshoring activities into their core components depending on whether or not the firm buys (inputs) or sells (outputs) and/or owns assets in a given country and examine the extent to which sustainability practices influence the different components of offshoring decisions. The results indicate that sustainability practices significantly affect offshoring activities of MNCs. In particular, we found that sustainable business practices matter when the firm sells goods or owns assets in the given host nation. Additionally, the results show that the sustainability–degree of the internationalization relationship is crucial for MNCs that have offshoring activities in advanced economies relative to those firms that have activities in emerging markets. Our results are robust to alternative explanations.