We examine whether and how foreign environmental standards influence global sourcing decisions. Taking a question-driven approach, we find a negative association between the stringency of a country's environmental standards and its share in US imports for 82 manufacturing industries across 77 countries between 2006 and 2016. This pollution haven effect holds not only for sourcing from owned foreign operations (offshore integration), but also for sourcing from unrelated third parties abroad (offshore outsourcing), and is stronger in industries with high toxic emissions and low technological intensity. These results are robust across alternative measures of environmental stringency and to using the Kyoto Agreement as an instrumental variable. These findings shed new light on how firms use global sourcing, and especially offshore outsourcing, to arbitrage across institutional environments.

中文翻译：

---

顺风顺水：污染避风港对全球采购的影响

我们研究外国环境标准是否以及如何影响全球采购决策。采用问题驱动的方法，我们发现一个国家的环境标准的严格程度与其在 2006 年至 2016 年间在 77 个国家/地区的 82 个制造行业的美国进口份额之间存在负相关。这种污染避风港效应不仅适用于从拥有的外国采购运营（离岸整合），但也从国外无关的第三方采购（离岸外包），并且在有毒排放量高和技术强度低的行业中更强大。这些结果在环境严格性的替代措施中以及使用京都协议作为工具变量时都是稳健的。这些发现揭示了公司如何使用全球采购，尤其是离岸外包，