Mardi | 2013-11-05
B103

Rémi BAZILLIER – Sophie HATTE – Julien VAUDAY

The goal of this paper is to study the influence of corporate environmental responsibility(CER) and national environmental standards on the location choices of the 600 biggest European firms. By using the environmental score provided by Vigeo, we are able to test the influence of the environmental performances of firms. We find a negative interaction effect between these environmental performances and national environmental regulations. This result is only valid when considering de facto environmental standards, not de jure environmental standards. All things being equal, firms with better environmental performances tend to be located in dirtier countries. This result contradicts Dam & Scholtens (2008) who found a positive interaction effect. We argue that this is explained by behavior differences between firms which are improving their CER and firms which already had a high level of CER.