Does the higher education expansion policy affect the entrepreneurship of urban college students in China?

ABSTRACT

The impact of education on entrepreneurial choice is ambiguous in both theory and empirics. Based on the data from the 2016 China Labour-Force Dynamics Survey, this paper studies the impact of China’s Higher Education Expansion (HEE) policy initiated in 1999 on the entrepreneurial behaviour of urban college students and its transmission mechanism by employing the difference-in-difference approach. The results show that the implementation of the HEE policy has significantly promoted the entrepreneurship of urban college students and the HEE policy stimulates urban college students’ entrepreneurship by decreasing the rate of return to urban college students’ education.

KEYWORDS:

• Entrepreneurship
• higher education expansion policy
• urban college students
• China labour-force dynamics survey

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I20
• J20

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics [KCSZ202130].