Does Land Certification Stimulate Farmers’ Entrepreneurial Enthusiasm? Evidence from Rural China

Deepening the reform of rural land property rights and fully releasing the dividends of land policies to stimulate the vitality of rural development are important foundations for China’s Poverty Alleviation and Rural Revitalization strategies. Based on the data of the China Household Finance Surveys in 2013 and 2019, this study takes the new round of land certification launched in 2013 as the starting point for exploring the impact of rural land property rights reform on farmers’ entrepreneurship, using the difference-in-differences model. The results show that the implementation of the new round of land certification has significantly improved the development of agricultural entrepreneurship among farmers with certificates but has had no impact on non-agricultural entrepreneurship. The estimated results from the replacement explained variables, PSM-DID method, and placebo test verifies the robustness of the baseline results. Furthermore, it is shown that the improvement of labor allocation, land transfer, and financing and loan constraints are the main channels through which land certification affects farmers’ entrepreneurship; the impact is heterogeneous at province, community, and household levels. This study not only provides new evidence for using rural land property rights reform to spearhead poverty alleviation and rural revitalization strategies but also provides beneficial reference material for the continuous optimization of land property rights certificates to boost farmers’ entrepreneurship.