Promoting employment through entrepreneurship is an important element of China’s employment priority strategy. By the end of 2020, the number of market entities of all kinds in China had grown to 144 million, among which the number of self-employment as a direct business activity had reached 967 million (National Bureau of Statistics, 2021). Self-employment is not only a specific extension of “entrepreneurship,” but also an employment choice made by entrepreneurs according to the economic market environment (Colovic and Schruoffeneger, 2021), which is conducive to gaining social respect, realizing self-worth, and improving the level of economic returns (Blundel et al., 2010). Especially under the influence of the overall downward trend of the world economy, entrepreneurship-led employment has the important task of improving people’s livelihood and promoting social development, and has become one of the driving forces for achieving macroeconomic growth (Qin and Kong, 2021; Azoulay et al., 2022). Under the influence of the epidemic, people’s employment and entrepreneurship are facing severe challenges (Dias et al., 2022). Supporting and encouraging different groups to engage in entrepreneurship has become a public policy direction of concern for the Chinese government (Bublitz et al., 2020).

Therefore, it is important to study and explore the driving factors of entrepreneurship. In terms of the driving factors influencing individual entrepreneurial choices, the accumulation of knowledge, skills, cognition, and capital involved in prior experiences play an important role in facilitating the choice of entrepreneurial behavior (Hockerts, 2017). Also, farm-related experience is an important micro factor in the structure of the rural economy and a typical feature of the rapid urbanization process in China (Zhong and Chen, 2014). This process has resulted in a large number of rural laborers moving to urban areas or transforming into urban populations, who are divorced from agricultural labor and engaged in secondary or tertiary non-farm employment (Zhao et al., 2022). In the process of non-farm employment, the role of farming experience is reflected in at least three aspects: (1) it provides a comparison between the benefits of farming and non-farm employment and provides a reference for their subsequent career choices (Zhong and Chen, 2014). (2) Farming experience is a survival skill that expands workers’ human capital accumulation. (3) It helps workers adapt to different labor styles in different environments and enhances their urban. At the same time, it is conducive to workers’ adaptation to different environments and enhances their urban adaptation ability. As an important part of workers’ prior experience, past experiences such as farming experience may have long-term effects on individual behavior (Kendler et al., 2002).

Previous studies have laid a good foundation for this study. Some scholars have conducted in-depth research on the impact of bad experience on individual economic behavior. For example, some scholars pointed out that farmers who experienced famine in their early years tend to have a higher tendency to save (Cheng and Zhang, 2011), and individuals with a difficult childhood experience are less likely to engage in self-employment (Drennan et al., 2005). Managers of firms who have had early experiences of famine will be less effective in leading the firm to make investments (Donaldson, 1990; Malmendier et al., 2011). In addition, urban residents with a rural upbringing experience will have a lower probability of participating in the stock market (Jiang et al., 2018). Fan (2017) states that people with upbringing experience are more inclined to purchase insurance and reduce their risky asset holdings.

However, some scholars have also identified individual-level traits and possession of experiences as important factors driving entrepreneurial behavioral choices (Clarysse et al., 2011; Iversen et al., 2016). Prior life experiences facilitate the accumulation of human capital, enhance information intake and interpretation, and facilitate entrepreneurial opportunity identification (Shane, 2000; Rerup, 2005). The relationship between individuals having relevant work experience and entrepreneurship shows an inverted U-type relationship that rises and then falls, but the positive effect remains significant (Rider et al., 2013). Similar to rural-related experience, a person’s prior relevant experience has a significant driving effect on their decision to engage in venture-based entrepreneurship (Kendler et al., 2002). It has also been argued that corporate executives with early adverse experiences significantly increase social giving and treat others more generously (Yuan et al., 2019). A study based on data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) concluded that the experience of going to the countryside could significantly increase the probability and size of investment in stocks and financial assets of urban households (Zhou et al., 2020).

Based on the existing research, the interest and question of this paper are to explore how the farming experience affects entrepreneurial decision? Further, if there is a significant effect, through which channels does it affect the entrepreneurial decision of the population? Does the identification of this effect vary across groups? Clarifying these questions will be useful in promoting the quality of employment and helping to promote the employment-first strategy.

The marginal contributions of this paper are as follows: First, from the perspective of farming experience, this paper excavates the influencing factors of urban residents’ entrepreneurship, enriching the research field of people’s entrepreneurial behavior. Second, it puts forward the theoretical hypothesis that agricultural experience affects entrepreneurship and empirically tests the indirect effect of personality characteristics in the process of agricultural experience affecting entrepreneurship, which expands the research depth. Third, the group regression is carried out from the heterogeneity of city type, age stage, and material capital, trying to capture which groups of farming experience are more likely to affect entrepreneurial activities.

Since China’s reform and opening up in 1978, the development of urbanization and industrialization has promoted the rapid growth of China’s economy (Duan and Zhang, 2009). However, constrained by the dualistic system of urban–rural division, the transfer of agricultural labor during urbanization, although meaningful for promoting employment, has not been effectively linked to urban public services and management associated with the household registration system (Yu and Gao, 2009). This means that labels associated with rural areas, such as agricultural household registration and migrant workers, tend to impede their mobility to higher levels of the labor market (Wu and Zheng, 2018). With the rapid advancement of China’s household registration system reform and the citizenship process of the agricultural population, new citizens have gradually become the driving force influencing urban economic development (Liang et al., 2022), and the proportion of urban residents with experience in farming has gradually increased. If urban residents have engaged in agricultural labor, it may have a two-way effect of promoting and inhibiting residents’ entrepreneurship. On the one hand, past experience can enhance one’s experience and personality traits, and give one the ability to cope with corresponding events and risks (Hoff and Stiglitz, 2016). At the same time, it is conducive to accumulating a certain amount of “potential human capital,” helping one to cope with setbacks and improve self-adaptability, and may have some positive effects on one’s long-term development (Chetty et al., 2010). On the other hand, the farming experience tends to be constrained by the rural environment and has a solidifying effect on their cognitive thinking and behavioral performance, which may reduce their preference for venture capital and have a negative effect on their personal and economic behavior (Jiang et al., 2018). Therefore, the theoretical impact of farming experience on entrepreneurial decisions is uncertain and needs to be tested empirically.

Although farming experience may have a significant effect on entrepreneurial decisions, this hypothesis may have heterogeneous effects on different groups. First, for different age groups, middle-aged groups are more likely to have farming experience, while youth groups are largely disconnected from land in terms of income (Wang, 2008). Therefore, the impact of farming experience on economic activity may be higher for middle-aged groups than youth groups. Second, for different city levels, provincial capitals are more economically developed, with larger cities and earlier urbanization (Zhu and Yang, 2018), and thus policy support and economic advantages may form a substitution effect on individual factors. For the vast majority of non-capital cities, which are generally at the stage of rapid urbanization and have a greater hierarchy of economic development, the past experiences possessed by the labor force may be more sensitive to the impact of socioeconomic activities and generate a relatively larger marginal contribution compared to the provincial capitals. Third, for groups with different physical capital, it is easier to obtain desirable income returns in the labor market among high-physical capital groups, whose past experiences may be more effective in driving current economic activities (Shum and Faig, 2006), which is conducive to give better play to the advantages of their previous experience and have an impact on economic behavior.

Traditionally, agricultural labor is the main source of income for rural laborers and is responsible for maintaining household consumption and savings. As a result, rural laborers have to bear the risks involved in farming. In addition, if natural or man-made disasters occur, they may lose their source of income and fall into a “livelihood crisis” (Crupi et al., 2022). Because farming is subject to a variety of factors such as natural environment, weather conditions, and environmental changes, its output is far more uncertain than that of other industries (Timmer, 1988), and only hard-working and intelligent workers can earn a good income (Bernstein, 2001). So the complexity involved in the farming experience may be conducive to shaping an optimistic personality and the accumulation of the ability to cope with such “crises.” The sense of mutual help is likewise another important aspect in shaping personality traits. The sense of mutual help is inherited, and the promotion of traditional Chinese virtues is more deeply reflected in the values at the individual level. As an extension of personal traits, it not only helps to regulate the framework of economic behavior for those involved in economic activities, but also helps to stimulate various potentials of individuals in economic activities and increase their enthusiasm in economic activities, providing vitality for the development of market economy (Luthans et al., 2007).

Entrepreneurs are not sure if they are suitable to start a business at first, but they can learn from their existing experiences and become optimistic and confident as they gain social experience (Fraser and Greene, 2006). Choosing to start a business and becoming an entrepreneur are two processes of learning, and the personality characteristics of entrepreneurs have an important impact on the learning process of entrepreneurs (Littunen, 2013). Personality traits as a unique resource endowment of entrepreneurs are conducive to entrepreneurial performance (Zhang and Bruning, 2011), and personality traits remain largely stable over the life cycle after being formed at an early age (Caspi et al., 1984). Studies have found that personality quality with resilience as the core significantly improves entrepreneurial performance (Hmieleski and Carr, 2009). At the same time, entrepreneurship is a difficult process, which requires entrepreneurs to have comprehensive abilities (Cubero et al., 2022); among them, the excellent traits that entrepreneurs possess are crucial in the entrepreneurial process (Aldrich and Cliff, 2003), which helps to provide entrepreneurs with high motivation in the face of adversity and enhances the success rate of entrepreneurship (Urban et al., 2022).

Based on the above analysis, this paper puts forward the following three hypotheses:

Equation 2 is the main regression of the effect of Farming Experience on entrepreneurship. Equation 3 is the effect of Farming Experience on the mediating variable, and Equation 4 is the effect of Farming Experience and the mediating variable on Entrepreneurial Decision, where X_i denotes the explanatory variable Farming Experience, and M_i denotes the mediating variable. According to the test procedure (Wen and Ye, 2014), first, the main effect of Farming Experience on entrepreneurship is tested for significance, i.e., the significance of c in Equation 2. Second, the effect of Farming Experience on the mediating variable is estimated, i.e., the coefficient a in Equation 3. Third, the effect of Farming Experience on entrepreneurship is examined by including both Farming Experience and the mediating variables in the regression equation, i.e., the coefficients c^`and b in Equation 4. If each process is significant, the mediating effect holds. However, if the a in Equation 3 and bin Equation 4 is not significant, it is necessary to apply the Bootstrap method to directly test H0: ab = 0. If it is significant, the indirect effect still exists, and if it is not significant, the indirect effect does not hold.

The mediating variables chosen in this paper are positive personality traits, which are measured by Optimism and Mutual aid consciousness. For mediating variables, the Optimism variable was designed as “Do you usually have emotional problems”, and the corresponding responses were “No, rarely, sometimes, and often,” and the values were assigned as “1, 2, 3, and 4.” Luthans et al. (2007) classified psychological utility into four dimensions: self-efficacy, optimism, hope, and resilience. And individuals’ usual emotional problems are not only a reflection of optimism and hope, but also an indirect refraction of self-efficacy. The questionnaire design for Mutual aid consciousness is “how often neighbors help each other,” and we assign 0 to “very little, little, and average” and 1 to “a lot, and a lot.” This is a dummy variable for the Mutual aid consciousness.

The results of the test for the mediating effect are shown in Table 6. Column (1) shows the effect of Farming Experience on positive personality traits, and the results show that Farming Experience significantly reduces disillusionment and has a positive effect on the development of a sense of mutuality. Columns (2) to (3) show the effect of Farming Experience and mediating variables on Entrepreneurial Decision, respectively. It can be seen that positive personality traits, consisting of optimism and a sense of mutuality, significantly increase the probability of entrepreneurship, and the values of Farming Experience coefficients tend to decrease compared to the results of the baseline regression, indicating that the mediating variables partially dilute the effect of the explanatory variables. This validates the mechanism of positive personality traits in H3. The above findings suggest that Optimism and Mutual aid consciousness are the transmission mechanisms through which Farming Experience affects labor force entrepreneurship.

This paper examines the impact of farming experience on urban residents’ entrepreneurial decisions based on 2016 CLDS data. The estimation results show that having farming experience can play a significant role in promoting urban residents’ entrepreneurial decisions compared to those without farming experience. To verify the robustness of the estimation results, this paper applies the instrumental variables method to test the results, and the results remain significant. The analysis of potential mechanisms of action revealed that the farming experience indirectly promotes entrepreneurial decisions through the mediating role of promoting positive personality traits such as optimism and a sense of mutuality. The results of the subsample discussion show that the effect of farming experience on the entrepreneurial decision is more significant in the middle-aged group, in non-capital cities, and in groups with high-physical capital.

Farming experience has an impact on economic behavior, which has implications for understanding residents’ entrepreneurial decisions in terms of micro-individual characteristics. We argue that positive personality traits such as optimism and mutual aid can be used as theoretical mechanisms to promote entrepreneurial decision-making through farming experiences, thus fostering positive personality traits that can help complement formal social institutions to promote individual entrepreneurial intentions. It is undeniable that entrepreneurship is an important factor in promoting economic development, as it not only contributes to solving social employment problems, but is also important in promoting labor demand and achieving fuller and higher quality employment. Distinguishing from previous studies that have focused on macroeconomic aspects to enhance the scale of urban entrepreneurship, the findings of this study imply the importance of micro-individual characteristics to influence entrepreneurial decisions. Based on the main conclusions above, the following policy recommendations are proposed:

This paper studies the relationship between agricultural experience and people’s entrepreneurship. However, as entrepreneurship is a part of venture capital, it is planned to carry out the correlation between agricultural experience and venture capital in future research, including the similarities and differences between fund investment, stock investment, and bank time deposit. At the same time, this paper focuses on the indirect effect of personality characteristics. The follow-up study will further combine the relationship between personality characteristics and social and economic activities to explore the relationship between personality characteristics and new forms of employment. Of course, obtaining continuous dynamic tracking data is also the focus of this paper in the future.

The original contributions presented in this study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

DZ carried out the study and analyzed the data. DZ and LL drafted the manuscript and were responsible for writing the literary and revising the language. LL provided the guidance for revising the manuscript. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript.