| In the current context of "mass entrepreneurship" and rural revitalization strategy,farmers’ entrepreneurship has become an important driving force to promote the endogenous development of rural areas,innovate agricultural production,and drive villagers to wealth.However,as entrepreneurship is a high-risk economic activity,entrepreneurial talent has an important impact on entrepreneurial opportunity identification,capital financing,resource management and risk control.Financial literacy,as an important representation of entrepreneurial talent,can not only help individuals rationally analyze the risks and benefits of entrepreneurship,but also improve their ability to access entrepreneurial resources and stimulate entrepreneurial motivation.Therefore,it is important to explore the influence of financial literacy on farmers’ entrepreneurial decisions to deeply understand rural entrepreneurial dynamics and promote rural development.First,based on entrepreneurship theory,human capital theory,credit rationing theory,and social capital theory,this thesis constructs a theoretical logical framework of financial literacy,credit constraints,and social networks influencing farmers’ entrepreneurial decision;then,using data from 2628 households in the China Land Economic Survey(CLES),we use factor analysis to construct a financial literacy index as a measure of farmers’ financial literacy level,and Probit and IV-Probit models are used to empirically analyze the direct impact of financial literacy on farmers’ entrepreneurial decisions;secondly,the mediating effect model is used to empirically test the mechanism of the role of credit constraints and social networks in financial literacy affecting farmers’ entrepreneurial decisions,and the heterogeneity of this mechanism is tested.Finally,this thesis also analyzes the heterogeneity of farmers’ education level,training,entrepreneurial learning,and the region they live in.The findings of this thesis are as follows:(1)Financial literacy has a significant positive effect on farmers’ entrepreneurial decisions.By calculating the marginal effects,financial literacy promoted farmers’ entrepreneurial decisions at the 1% level of significance.Also,the reliability of this finding is confirmed by the regression results after addressing the endogeneity problem using the instrumental variables approach.After further subdividing the entrepreneurial decision into agricultural and non-farm entrepreneurship,financial literacy was found to positively influence agricultural entrepreneurial decision at 5% level of significance.After replacing the independent variables and using logit regression,the results indicate that the effect of financial literacy on farmers’ entrepreneurial decisions is robust to both agricultural and non-farm entrepreneurship.(2)Mechanistic analysis shows that increased financial literacy significantly reduces the formal credit constraints faced by farmers.Further analysis shows that increased financial literacy can positively influence farmers’ entrepreneurial decisions by increasing their access to formal traditional credit,digital credit.In addition,improved financial literacy can also enhance the probability of farmers’ entrepreneurship by expanding their social networks and strengthening their use of social networks to access more entrepreneurial support and resources.(3)Through heterogeneity analysis,this thesis finds the following results.First,the lower the education level of farmers,the more significant the entrepreneurial effect of financial literacy;moreover,the entrepreneurial effect of financial literacy is more significant for farmers with no training.Second,for farmers who lacked entrepreneurial role models and had high perceived risk of entrepreneurial failure,financial literacy enhanced their entrepreneurial confidence and promoted farmers’ entrepreneurship.Finally,this thesis also finds that the entrepreneurial effect of financial literacy is more significant in the central and northern Jiangsu Province,general economic development areas and low economic development level regions. |
