Jingbo Cui、Harvey Lapan、GianCarlo Moschini：Productivity, Export and Environmental Performance: Air Pollutants in the United States

【Abstract】This paper studies the firm-level relationship among productivity, decision to export, and environmentalperformance. The emerging theoretical and empirical literature suggests that trade has animportant role in determining firms’ heterogeneity: increased openness to trade induces a reallocationeffect that increases within-industry efficiency, thereby linking firms’ decisions to exportand adopt newer (and cleaner) technology. We argue that this framework provides the followingempirically-relevant predictions: there is an inverse relationship between firm productivity andpollution emissions per unit output; exporting firms have lower emissions per unit output; andlarger firms have a lower emission intensity. To examine these implications empirically, we haveassembled a uniquely detailed dataset of the U.S. manufacturing industry for the years 2002, 2005,and 2008 by matching facility-level air emission data from the U.S. Environmental ProtectionAgency with the facility’s economic characteristics contained in the National Establishment TimeSeries database. The strategy is to first estimate a facility-level total factor productivity parameteras a plant-specific fixed effect. We then investigate how this estimated productivity parametercorrelates with emission intensity on a pollutant-by-pollutant basis. Our empirical findings supportthe hypotheses suggested by the conceptual model. For each criteria air pollutant considered,we find a significant negative correlation between estimated facility productivity and emissionintensity. Conditional on a facility’s estimated productivity and other controls, exporting facilitieshave significantly lower emissions per value of sales than non-exporting facilities in the sameindustry. We also find that plant size is negatively and significantly related to emission intensityfor all pollutants.

【Keywords】Export；facility-level pollution；heterogeneous firms；total factor productivity；trade and the environment.

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