Under China’s current land institutional framework, local governments predominantly allo-cate industrial land through long-term transfers at maximum statutory terms, imposing high upfront costs on firms and limiting entry flexibility. To address these constraints, China has progressively explored flexible industrial land transfer models. However, existing studies largely focus on policy design and macro-level outcomes, lacking micro-level empirical evidence on how flexible transfers affect firm entry and its underlying mechanisms.

Using panel data from 277 prefecture-level cities from 2008 to 2022 and a staggered DID model, this paper examines the impact of flexible industrial land transfer reform on firm entry from a micro-level perspec-tive. The results show that the reform significantly promotes firm entry, increasing newly registered firms by 0.129 per 100 people on average. Mechanism testing shows that flexible contracts reduce upfront land acquisition costs, investment intensity, and asset specificity risks, and this effect is stronger in cities with higher economic uncertainty, confirming the uncertainty-mitigation channel. Heterogeneity analysis further reveals that the effect of the reform is concentrated among small firms, service industries, and high-income cities, whereas the impact on large firms and secondary industries is relatively limited. The reform also significantly promotes the entry of formal corporate entities while suppressing that of rural professional cooperatives, reflec-ting a “land institution substitution” effect.

This paper makes the following marginal contributions: First, moving beyond the intuitive logic in exis-ting literature that flexible transfers merely lower land costs, it constructs a dual-dimensional micro-analytical framework of “asset specificity—uncertainty” and explains from the perspective of contract structure how the flexible land transfer reform affects firm entry, as well as its underlying mechanisms. Second, it incorporates the contract structure of land, a foundational element in the real economy, into the analytical framework of entrepreneurial decision-making, offering direct implications for designing inclusive and adaptable “entrepreneurship-friendly” land policies in various regions. Third, it provides robust causal evidence on the effect of the reform, overcoming the limitations of prior case-based studies and offering more direct and precise empirical support for the effectiveness of flexible transfer policies.