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| Aging Populations and Regional Entrepreneurship: A Study Using Entrepreneurship Data from Qixinbao |
| WANG Zhengwei, LI Mengyun, LIAO li, SHI Yongbin
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| PBC School of Finance, Tsinghua University |
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Abstract Programmatic documents such as the “Report to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China” contain important theses on entrepreneurship. However, the aging of China's population is becoming an increasingly serious economic issue. A national strategy for actively responding to this demographic trend is present in the 14th Five-Year Plan. Accordingly, exploring the impact of population aging on regional levels of entrepreneurship has academic value and policy significance.
City-level entrepreneurial data are obtained from Qixinbao and city-level population aging data are obtained from a population extrapolation model. Family planning policy is used as an instrumental variable to establish a causal identification between aging and entrepreneurship. The analysis shows that every 1% increase in the dependency ratio of the elderly population reduces the number of entrepreneurial enterprises by about 10%, which is an economically significant decrease. In addition, this paper introduces the use of registered capital to classify the size of enterprises and finds that population aging mainly affects mid-sized enterprises. The paper also conducts some in-depth mechanism tests and finds two mechanisms driving the relationship between an aging population and entrepreneurship: the pension pressure mechanism within the family and the rank effect mechanism outside the family.
The pension pressure mechanism occurs because an aging population increases the pressure on potential entrepreneurs to support elderly family members; as family members spend more time and energy taking care of the elderly, family economic pressure increases. In such scenarios, family members avoid engaging in high-risk activities such as entrepreneurship. This paper provides evidence of this mechanism at both the macro and micro levels. At the macro level, the paper shows that in cities with lower levels of medical care or worse insurance coverage, the impact of aging on the level of entrepreneurship is stronger. At the micro level, this paper uses the household finance survey data of CHIP2013 to show that the pension pressure within a family can inhibit the entrepreneurial behavior of family members. Furthermore, if the elderly family members have insurance, the pension pressure within the family is to a certain extent alleviated.
The rank effect mechanism is related to the fact that entrepreneurship requires both youth and entrepreneurial resources. In areas with aging populations, more important positions are occupied by older individuals, and it is difficult for young people to obtain important positions and accumulate entrepreneurial resources, thus reducing the level of entrepreneurship. This paper provides evidence of this mechanism at both the macro and micro levels. At the macro level, the paper finds that in cities with higher proportions of state-owned units,the inhibiting effect of aging on the level of entrepreneurship is stronger. In addition, physical capital-intensive industries are more strongly affected by the rank effect, and aging has a greater impact on the level of entrepreneurship in these industries. At the micro level, after controlling for pension pressure within families, the paper shows that the overall age of a city's population has a significant inhibiting effect on the entrepreneurial behavior of family members, and we links this observation to the rank effect mechanism.
The innovations of this paper can be summarized as follows. First, a big data set is used to describe the entrepreneurial activities in all of the cities and the aging data are obtained using a population extrapolation model. This is therefore the first study to investigate the relationship between population aging and entrepreneurship at the city level in China. Second, this paper proposes and examines two new parallel mechanisms (the pension pressure mechanism within the family and the rank effect mechanism outside the family). Third, this paper uses family planning policy as an instrumental variable for population aging, overcoming the endogeneity problems that may exist in this study design.
The findings have certain policy implications. First, to release entrepreneurial energy and drive high-quality economic growth, China should continue to ease its population policies. Second, to mitigate the impact of an aging population on entrepreneurship, China needs to continuously improve access to medical services and insurance coverage.
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Received: 21 May 2020
Published: 01 April 2022
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