商事制度改革有效激发创业了吗?——来自地级市的证据

Has Commercial System Reform Effectively Stimulated Entrepreneurship?Evidence from Prefecture-level Cities

商事制度是与企业创立最为直接相关的经济制度,是创业和营商环境的基础性部分,会极大地影响创业的成本、复杂度及不确定性。近年来,我国启动和推进商事制度改革,为评估创业环境的经济效应提供了不可多得的素材。文章以此改革为"准自然实验",手工收集整理283个地级市的商事制度改革数据,采用双重差分模型考察了商事制度改革对地区创业的影响。研究发现,商事制度改革显著提高了地区新增企业的增长率,提升了地区创业水平。具体而言,商事制度改革的实施提高了约2%的地区创业活动,且此发现通过了一系列的稳健性检验。对影响机制的检验发现,商事制度改革降低了市场进入成本,提高了政府运行质量,从而促进了地区创业。进一步的研究表明,外商直接投资水平、金融发展及人力资本的提高均能强化商事制度改革对地区创业活动的促进效应。文章的研究为深化经济体制改革,最大限度激发市场活力提供了有益的参考依据。

Commercial system reform is the most directly related economic system for a new business.It is the basic part of business environment,which greatly affects the cost,complexity and uncertainty of entrepreneurship.In recent years,China has initiated and promoted commercial system reform,which provides rare materials for evaluating the effect of entrepreneurship environment.In this paper,commercial system reform is regarded as a quasi-natural experiment.We collect the data of 283 prefecture-level cities’commercial system reform by hand,use the Difference-in-Differences Model to investigate the impact of commercial system reform on entrepreneurship,and discuses the influencing mechanism and heterogeneity effect.The contributions of this paper are highlighted in the following aspects:First,the commercial system is the focus of system reform since the 18 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.Some literature pays attention to the influence of institutions on entrepreneurship,but there is no literature on the effect of commercial system reform on entrepreneurship.More importantly,although the existing literature discusses the impact of administrative examination and approval reform,it focuses more on the administrative examination and approval center.Based on the existing literature,this paper makes theoretical analysis and empirical evaluation on the entrepreneurial effect of commercial system reform for the first time.Second,our study takes the gradual reform of the commercial system as a quasi-natural experiment,and finds out the feasible strategy to identify the economic effect of commercial system reform.In this paper,the text analysis method is used to identify the process of commercial system reform,and the DID Model is used to investigate the impact of commercial system reform on entrepreneurship.Third,this study also analyzes the impact mechanism of commercial system reform on entrepreneurship,focusing on the market entry cost reduction effect and the government operation quality improvement effect.In addition,we also identify the heterogeneity effect of commercial system reform on entrepreneurship.The results show that commercial system reform has significantly increased the growth rate of new enterprises,and thus improved the level of regional entrepreneurship.Specifically,the implementation of commercial system reform has increased about 2%of regional entrepreneurship activities.This finding has passed a series of robustness tests.The test of the impact mechanism shows that commercial system reform reduces the cost of market entry and improves the efficiency of the government,thus promoting entrepreneurship.Further research shows that the promotion of foreign direct investment,the easing of financing constraints and the improvement of human capital can strengthen the promotion effect of commercial system reform on entrepreneurship.The findings of this study provide useful reference for deepening economic system reform and stimulating market vitality to the maximum extent.