Whether it's green or brown, buy local: Exploring the acquisition choice of manufacturing firms

We investigate acquisitions of new facilities by manufacturing firms to understand whether green management matters. We advance evolutionary/behavioral routine-based perspective to explain firm's choice of target acquisition based on their environmental performance. Based on Toxic Research Inventory data, we find that firms search locally and choose targets that are proximate in terms of core business and environmental performance. Yet, we also find that firms engage in distant search in terms of environmental performance by selecting those facilities with unrelated routines when they are geographically proximate.