Return-home entrepreneurship and rural economic resilience: evidence from China's National pilot program

We study whether policies that encourage migrants to return home and start businesses strengthen rural economies. We treat China's national return-home entrepreneurship pilot, introduced in cohorts in 2016 and 2017, as a quasi-natural experiment and assemble an unbalanced panel of 2,097 counties, county-level cities, and urban districts from 1999 to 2023. A staggered difference-in-differences design indicates that pilot designation is positively associated with a principal-component index of rural economic resilience capacity and that the estimated effect emerges with a lag. The joint test of all pretreatment coefficients does not reject equality to zero at the 5% level, although it is marginal at the 10% level; a negative pooled long-lead estimate therefore continues to warrant caution. Alternative staggered-adoption estimators, resilience indices that exclude development-oriented components, a sample restricted through 2021, and a complete-case regression using only original non-interpolated observations all remain positive. Channel regressions show that the pilot raises the secondary- and tertiary-sector share and the China Rural Agriculture-Related Innovation Index, although these patterns do not establish causal mediation. Digital financial inclusion is not robust to county and year fixed effects. Formal between-group tests indicate significant regional and poverty-status differences, but not significant grain-production or labor-export differences; Hypothesis IV is therefore only partially supported. The national pilot ended in 2021, but return-home entrepreneurship policy continued through institutionalized support and nationwide promotion of the pilot experience. Accordingly, estimates after 2021 capture the persistent differential associated with earlier pilot designation in an environment of policy continuation and diffusion. Overall, the evidence is consistent with human-capital return and factor reallocation strengthening observed dimensions associated with rural economic resilience capacity, while the pooled long lead and the reduced coverage of the raw complete-case sample remain important qualifications.