Evaluating the Impact of the One-Child Policy on Children’s Entrepreneurship<br>—New Empirical Evidence from CFPS Data

As an important part of China’s basic national policy of family planning, the one-child policy, which has been in force for more than 30 years, has created a large one-child group whose unique growth background and family structure have had a far-reaching and long-lasting impact on China’s economic and social development. However, the existing studies on the intergenerational effects of the one-child policy have mostly focused on education, income, investment, savings, and other issues, but have not examined the issue of entrepreneurship. This paper empirically examines the impact of the one-child policy on children’s entrepreneurial decision-making and its mechanism of action using the cohort double-difference method based on the data specific to the 2010 China Family Tracking Survey (CFPS). The study finds that 1) The one-child policy significantly reduces the probability of children’s entrepreneurship. 2) Mechanism analysis shows that the one-child policy inhibits children’s entrepreneurial decision-making through two main paths: one is to increase children’s education level and strengthen the awareness of risk aversion, which increases the opportunity cost of entrepreneurship; and the other is to inhibit children’s social capital accumulation, which leads to the lack of entrepreneurial information, the ability to acquire resources and the ability to share risks. 3) Further analysis shows that the impact of the one-child policy on children’s entrepreneurial decision-making is geographically heterogeneous between urban and rural areas, as well as between East, Central, and West China. This paper enriches the research in the field of family planning policy effects and provides important policy insights and empirical support for encouraging children to engage in entrepreneurship in the context of the continuity of the childbearing policy.