Based on the perspective of institutional theory, calculating the 2017 China Provincial Doing Business Index and matching it with the CHFS database to explore the relationship between the doing business, the hard-environment of doing business, the soft-environment of doing business and residents’ entrepreneurship. Taking into account the endogenous nature of the doing business index and residents’ entrepreneurship, the average number of government affairs halls stationed in each province in 2017 and the average monthly office volume are used as instrumental variables of the province’s business environment to further estimate. The results found that optimizing the doing business, the hard-environment of doing business and the soft-environment of doing business can significantly increase residents'' entrepreneurial intentions. In terms of impact mechanism analysis, the results found that optimizing the doing business can increase the probability of residents'' entrepreneurship by promoting the degree of household digital application. The results based on the analysis of heterogeneity show that optimizing the doing business only significantly improves the entrepreneurial intentions of residents in the central and western regions. In addition, although optimizing the doing business has increased the probability of starting a business for urban residents, it has weakened the probability of rural residents choosing to start a business.