In contrast to the Pollution Haven Hypothesis, the Trade-Up Hypothesis holds that international integration helps … and emit less pollution than firms with no international linkage. We also find that firms with international linkage via … linkage, but find no evidence that the former emit less pollution than the latter. This provides a piece of empirical evidence …

direct investment (FDI) activities. We next take advantage of China's 11th Five-Year Plan as a quasi-natural experiment …, which imposed different pollution reduction targets across provinces, and examine its impact on firm-level FDI activities … policy endogeneity, missing variables, and expectation effect issues, which provides positive support for the pollution haven …