Doing Business in China - A Reproducibility and Replicability Assessment of Jia et al. (2021)

Jia et al. (2021) study the intergenerational transmission of entrepreneurship in China, finding that individuals are more likely to become business owners if they have a parent in a governmentlinked position or in business ownership. They further find that these associations depend on the role of the state in the local economy: the former is stronger in environments where the state plays a larger role, while the latter is stronger where it plays a smaller role. This robustness replication assesses each of these four claims. We only use the ready-for-analysis dataset provided by the authors and no additional raw data, varying pre-registered analytical choices. Despite involving only modest departures from the original specifications, the robustness analysis reveals substantial sensitivity in the published findings. Even simply adding parental college education as a control renders two of the three results originally significant at the 5% level insignificant at that threshold. The interaction between having a parent in a state-linked position and the degree of government involvement in the local economy becomes insignificant in all alternative specifications. The same interaction for parental business ownership is also sensitive: even when employing the 10% threshold used in Jia et al. (2021), 53% of specifications are insignificant. Overall, our findings suggest that most of the original results are not robust to plausible alternative analytical choices.