Abstract: Based on the tracking survey data of 414 households in two villages in Fuxian County, Shaanxi Province in 2016 and 2021, this paper uses the double-hurdle model to explore the impact of household decision makers’ income aspirations on farmers’ agricultural productive borrowing behaviors. The results show that, when the income aspirations index increases by one standard deviation, the amount of agricultural production borrowing funds of farmers will increase by 23.3%. This conclusion is still valid after a series of robustness tests. Heterogeneity analysis shows that income aspirations have a more significant promoting effect on the agricultural productive borrowing behavior of young age group farmers, as well as the farmers with more household assets or at lower education level. Mechanism analysis shows that risk preference plays a positive role in moderating the mentioned impact of income aspirations. In addition, for the families investing loans mainly in agricultural production, their family decision makers, if aspiring for higher income, are more inclined to borrow from both formal and informal financial institutions, rather than only from formal financial institutions.

Key words: agricultural productive borrowing, income aspirations, double hurdle model, whole village