Empirical evidence has so far failed to confirm that lenient environmental regulation attracts investment from polluting firms. We show that a firm may want to relocate to a country with stricter environmental regulation, when the move raises its rival's cost by sufficiently more than its own....

Trade liberalization in environmental goods is high on the agenda of the current Doha round. We examine its effects in a model with one domestic downstream polluting firm and two upstream firms (one domestic, one foreign). The domestic government sets the emission tax rate after the outcome of...