外出务工经历、社会资本与返乡农民工创业——来自CHIPS数据的证据

With the continuous development of historic node of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects, the employment of farmers has been closely watched. In the new economic background, a large number of migrant workers returning home further exacerbate the seriousness of farmer employment problem. How to realize the reemployment of these farmers and give full play to their comparative advantages in order to promote local economic development has become an urgent problem to be solved. Among many employment options, self-employment is seen as a cure for easing employment pressure. Farmer entrepreneurship can not only realize their own re-employment to increase household income and consumption, but also provide a lot of jobs to widely absorb rural idle labor force and improve the overall rural employment level. On the basis of existing research, this paper systematically assesses the impact of migrant working experience on entrepreneurship of migrant workers returning home based on CHIPS2007 microscopic investigation data, in order to provide the theoretical basis for the governments to encourage and support the migrant workers to build business. The preliminary regression results show that the migrant working experience can significantly increase the probability of farmers to start their self-employed business. In order to enhance the credibility of the conclusions, we use the instrumental variable method to eliminate the estimation errors caused by missing variables, and separately use the sample of heads of households to eliminate the interference from family spillover effects. Then the basic conclusion has not changed. The existing literature focuses on discussing the mediating effect of human capital and savings on peasant entrepreneurship, while ignoring the important channel of social capital, which has been analyzed complementally in this paper. The empirical results show that the farmers who have migrant working experience have a wider network of social relationships and are more likely to obtain the venture funds, customer resources and business permit for their entrepreneurship. In addition, we divide the entrepreneurship programs according to the standards of initial investment size and entrepreneurial purpose to further investigate the impact of migrant working experience on different types of start-ups. Specifically, migrant working experience has a significant impact on those small-scale investment and development-oriented projects, but no significant impact on those large-scale investment and survival-oriented projects. This study not only helps to explain the huge differences in different types of peasants on entrepreneurial decision-making, but also provides a theoretical basis for the governments to support migrant workers' returning home to build their own business.