Influence of Digital Finance on the Income of Rural Immigrant Population.

The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China pointed out that in order to make significant progress in the purpose of common prosperity of all people and achieve the goal of common prosperity, we must focus on increasing the wealth of low-income groups. In order to get rid of poverty, the rural labors usually have strong willingness to take their entrepreneurship, which is often hardly realized due to lack of funds. Traditional financial institutions have no incentive to support such small business, especially considering the risk in lending money to rural labor force. As a new financial model developed by the Internet, does digital finance have significant effects on solving their difficulties? How can digital finance improve the income of those entrepreneurs who have migrated from rural to urban? This paper focuses on these issues. First, this paper theoretically explains the effect and shows the impacting path of digital finance on the income of rural immigrant population. Then, based on the digital financial indexes of Peking University and the China Migrants Dynamic Survey in 2018 of the National Health Commission, this paper empirically studies the impact and the impacting path of digital finance on the income of rural immigrant population. Considering the fact affected by the development of digital finance in the different types of entrepreneurial behavior, this paper compares the rural immigrant population into two groups according to the current division of entrepreneurial types: survival entrepreneurship and development entrepreneurship. Considering that there would also be a reverse causality problem, this paper constructs instrumental variables by using the distance between the cities where rural immigrant entrepreneurs are located and the provincial capital, and the distance between the cities where rural immigrant entrepreneurs are located and the center of Hangzhou. This paper also uses Heckman two-step method to solve the endogenous problem caused by sample self-selection. Then, by using quantile regression method, this paper also makes a comparison on whether the regional digital finance development influences the entrepreneurship of rural immigrant population at different income levels. The results show that digital finance can effectively improve the income of rural immigrant entrepreneurs, and play a positive role in narrowing the income gap between different groups of rural immigrant entrepreneurs. Depth and breadth of digital finance can increase the income of entrepreneurs who are rural immigrant population. Second, the development of digital finance has more significantly impact on the income of rural immigrant population groups who are middle-income entrepreneurs compared with those high-income rural immigrant entrepreneurs. In addition, this paper finds that digital finance improves income of rural immigrant entrepreneurs by reducing the capital constraints, promoting more transformation in the field of entrepreneurship, expanding the scales of employment and enhancing their risk preference. This paper also discusses whether personal characteristics of entrepreneurs have a moderating effect on the impact of digital finance on entrepreneurial income. The results show that if the person who take entrepreneurships has higher human capital, deeper social integration ability and cognition in risk management, the effect of digital finance on increasing the entrepreneurial income of the rural immigrant population will be more effective. Finally, based on the conclusions, this paper gives some policy suggestions. First, we should constantly construct our Internet infrastructure, which is the preconditions for developing digital finance and expanding the coverage of digital finance. Second, we should focus on how to use digital finance in alleviating capital constraints in rural immigrant population, and adopt both online and offline ways to support the entrepreneurship. Third, digital financial services should be used carefully in order to reduce digital financial risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]