Highway proximity and sustainability practices in manufacturing SMEs

We study the relation between distance to highway and sustainability practices using a unique survey integrated with balance sheet information of almost 300 SMEs. The questions concern firms’ sustainability activities regarding environmental and social issues. Results show that firm proximity to the infrastructure increases sustainability practices both in terms of environmental and social issues. For environmental practices the outcome is non linear suggesting that the effect of proximity is particularly strong at very close distance. We address the omitted variable problem by adopting a sample splitting approach used in the literature, in which we show that for social sustainability our results are confirmed for young firms and consumer sensitive sectors