Abatement expenditures, technology choice, and environmental performance: Evidence from firm responses to import competition in Mexico
By E. Gutiérrez, Kensuke Teshima. Journal of Development Economics, 2017
145 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abatement expenditures are not the only available tool for firms to decrease emissions. Technology choice can also indirectly affect environmental performance. We assess the impact of import competition on plants' environmental outcomes. In particular, exploiting a unique combination of Mexican plant-level and satellite imagery data, we measure the effect of tariff changes due to free-trade agreements on three main outcomes: plants' fuel use, plants' abatement expenditures, and measures of air pollution around plants' location. Our findings show that import competition induced plants in Mexico to increase energy efficiency, reduce emissions, and in turn reduce direct investment in environmental protection. Our findings suggest that the general technology upgrading effect of any policy could be an important determinant of environmental performance in developing countries and that this effect may not be captured in abatement data.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f6f6b0af1c03ade0689cbe92f1fc5be4195ece0a
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Citations in the corpus
- Going Green in China: Firms’ Responses to Stricter Environmental Regulations (2019, background): “Some of the researchers find positive effects (Acemoglu, Akcigit, Hanley and Kerr, 2016; Aghion, Dechezleprêtre, Hemous, Martin and Van Reenen, 2016; Gutiérrez and Teshima, 2018; Aghion, Bénabou, Martin and Roulet, 2019), while some others find negative ones (Nelson, Tietenberg and Donihue, 1993;…”