Why are firms that export cleaner International trade, Abatement and Environmental：（为什么国际贸易公司,出口清洁,减排和环境）.pdfVIP

Why are rms that export cleaner? International trade, Abatement and Environmental Emissions Ÿ Rikard Forslid, Toshihiro Okubo, and Karen Helene Ulltveit-Moe Revised version of CEPR Discussion paper no. 8583. This version, January 2015 Abstract This paper develops a theoretical model of trade and environmental emissions with heterogeneous rms, where rms make abatement investments and thereby aect their level of emissions. We show that investments in abatement are positively related to rm productivity and rm exports, while emission intensity is negatively related to rms productivity and exports. The basic reason for these results is that a larger produc- tion scale supports more investments in abatement and, in turn, reduces emissions per output. We nd that trade liberalization weeds out the least productive and dirtiest rms thereby shifting production away from relatively dirty low productive local rms to more productive and cleaner exporters. The overall eect of trade is therefore to reduce emissions. We test the empirical implications of the model on emission inten- sity, abatement and exporting using rm-level data from Sweden. The empirical results support our model. JEL Classication : F12, F14, F18, Q56 Keywords:heterogeneous rms, environmental emissions, abatement, international trade We are grateful for comments from Andrew Bernard, Peter Egger, Peter Fredriksson, Beata Javorcik, Gordon Hanson, Peter Neary, Scott Taylor, Adrian Wood, and Tony Venables. Fi