Green returns to education: Does education affect pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors in China?

variable Environmental knowledge has significant and positive effects on pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. The addition of the environmental knowledge score in column (2) causes the coefficient of education to decrease from 0.012 to 0.007, indicating that 41.6% of the effect of education is explained by environmental knowledge. Similarly, we add the environ- mental knowledge score in column (4), resulting in a decrease in the magnitude of the coeffi- cient of education by 63.6%. Moreover, the estimated coefficients of education in columns (2) and (4) even become insignificant after controlling for the environmental knowledge. These results reveal that the mediator of environmental knowledge accounts for a large proportion of the effect of education. Hence, improved environmental knowledge is the important pathway through which education influences pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. 6. Conclusions In this paper, we investigate whether educational attainment promotes pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors in China, using microdata from CGSS 2010. We first construct an atti- tude score and a behavior score using the responses to three questions regarding the willing- ness of their pro-environmental attitudes and six questions about the frequency of their pro- environmental behaviors, respectively. We establish causality by exploiting the exogenous vari- ation induced by the implementation of the Compulsory Schooling Law (CSL) in China. We find evidence that educational attainment is associated with higher levels of both pro-environ-

mental attitudes and behaviors. The estimates from 2SLS regressions reveal that an additional year of schooling results in an increase of 0.012 and 0.011 in the pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors, which are approximately 2.1% and 2% of the corresponding sample means. Moreover, we show that the positive effects of education on pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors are robust to various robustness checks and are heterogeneous across individuals. Furthermore, we focus on environmental knowledge as the major pathway underlying the Table 9. The part of education effects mediated by environmental knowledge. Pro-environmental attitudes Pro-environmental behaviors Base Base+ Environmental knowledge Base Base+ Environmental knowledge 2SLS 2SLS 2SLS 2SLS (1) (2) (3) (4) Part of effects can be explained 41.6% 63.6% Education 0.012�� 0.007 0.011�� 0.004� (0.004) (0.005) (0.004) (0.001) Environmental 0.013��� 0.019��� knowledge (0.003) (0.003) Controls Yes Yes Yes Yes Observations 3,401 3,401 3,601 3,601 First-stage estimation CSL 2.949��� 2.448��� 3.154��� 2.625��� (0.255) (0.257) (0.260) (0.261) F-statistics 133.44 90.61 146.58 101.50 Note: The table reports the results of mediation analysis. 2SLS models are used for estimation. As the potential mediator, environmental knowledge is added to the regressions in column (2) and in column (4), respectively. For the purpose of comparison, the results of base model without environmental knowledge are reported in

column (1) and in column (3). All regressions also control for the covariates in the basic model as in column (2) of Table 3. The coefficients on the control variables are suppressed for brevity. Robust standard errors are clustered at the cohort-city level and are reported in parentheses. ���, �� and � indicate 1%, 5% and 10% significance levels, respectively. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0263383.t009 PLOS ONE Green returns to education PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0263383 February 3, 2022 17 / 20