Does College Education Promote Entrepreneurship in China?

Tianshu Chu and Qiang Wen ()
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Tianshu Chu: Southwestern University of Finance and Economics
Qiang Wen: Xiamen University

Journal of Labor Research, 2019, vol. 40, issue 4, No 4, 463-486

Abstract: Abstract There is no consensus on the impact of education on entrepreneurial choice in both theory and empirics. China’s Higher Education Expansion (HEE) policy initiated in 1999 provides us a unique opportunity to identity the causal relationship between college education and entrepreneurship by exploiting the Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design (FRDD) approach. In this paper, we use the China Household Income Project (CHIP) 2013 database, finding that China’s HEE policy significantly increases the probability of obtaining college education by 12%. There is suggestive evidence that college education decreases overall and self-employed-type of entrepreneurial choices, but increases boss-type activities; none of the coefficients are precisely estimated, though. Our results are robust to different inference approaches.

Keywords: College education; Entrepreneurship; Higher education expansion policy; Fuzzy regression discontinuity design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I25 J24 L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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DOI: 10.1007/s12122-019-09293-0

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