Trade liberalization and entrepreneurship: Evidence from China’s WTO accession

We investigate the effect of trade liberalization on entrepreneurship. By using China’s World Trade Organization accession as an exogenous shock to conduct a difference-in-differences estimation, we find that trade liberalization has a sizeable positive effect on entrepreneurship. Our findings are robust to different specifications and endogeneity problems. We further discuss the plausible mechanisms driving our results: the trade induced competition, and input market channel. China’s WTO accession may lead to more entrepreneurship in areas with low levels of economic development, a high level of trust, and industries with a low level of external finance dependence.