Do environmental regulations affect the location decisions of multinational gold mining firms?

This article empirically analyzes the regional location decisions of the world's major gold mining firms using a dataset of political, economic, regulatory, infrastructural and investment risk variables observed since 1975. The aim is to determine whether environmental stringency affects regional location decisions after controlling for other potentially important variables that may affect such decisions. Empirical results suggest that gold mining firms are strongly attracted to regions that are close to their head office and have low levels of corruption. They also have some preference for regions which provide a low risk, secure, transparent and stable environment for doing business. Gold mining firms also appear to be attracted to regions that have a clean environment, although evidence is less uniformly robust. However, most important key question of this study is that is there no evidence for pollution haven activity among the world's industrial gold mining firms?