Do Stringent Environmental Policies Deter FDI? M&A versus Greenfield

This study examines how environmental stringency affects the location decision of foreign direct investments. We analyze a firm-level data set on German outbound FDI and innovate on previous studies by controlling for the mode of entry and applying the mixed-logit analysis. The results show that Greenfield projects react to environmental regulation in a strongly different way than M&As. We find robust support for pollution haven hypothesis for polluting Greenfields. M&A investments in low polluting industries, on the other hand, seem to be attracted by stricter environmental regulation. We introduce a new instrumental variable for environmental stringency and apply it to verify the results.