Home / Lectures / Maggie Zhou, University of Michigan
Offshoring Pollution while Offshoring Production

Maggie Zhou, University of Michigan
Description
Semester:
- Fall 2015
Speakers:
Lecture Time:
Fri, October 16, 2015 @ 1:30 pm to 3:00 pm
Lecture Location:
Room R1240, Ross School of Business
Speaker Webpage(s):
https://michiganross.umich.edu/faculty-research/faculty/yue-maggie-zhou
Introduced By:
No introduction available.
Abstract
We combine international trade data from the U.S. Census Bureau with Toxics Release
Inventory data from the Environmental Protection Agency to investigate the impact of firms’
imports on toxic emissions by their U.S. plants. We find that goods imported from low-wage
countries (LWCs) are more pollution-intensive than goods imported from the rest of the world.
Moreover, plants release less toxic emissions and spend less on pollution abatement on American
soil when their parent firms import more from LWCs. According to our estimates, a 10%
increase in a plant’s parent firm’s share of imports from LWCs is associated with a 4% drop in
the plant’ toxic emissions and a 3.75% reduction in pollution abatement expenditures. These
effects are stronger for plants located in dirtier U.S. counties, where benefits from pollution
reduction are expected to be the largest. These results provide some of the first large-sample
empirical evidence that U.S. firms offshore both production and pollution to the developing
world.
Recording & Additional Notes
No recordings available.
Introduction by Saerom Lee, Strategy