Exporting and the Environment: A New Look with Micro Data

Recent aggregate studies by Levinson (2007) and Antweiler et al.(2001) show that trade can have be environmentally beneficial. We usea unique micro-data panel for the UK for 1998 to 2004 for over 900firms to find that both the use of innovation for environmentalabatement and cutting the cost of materials is higher for exporters.This result is in line with the intuition that exporters, being moreproductive and needing to amortize the fixed investment cost of greenproduction, are more likely to use green innovation