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

relationship between education and pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. We find that the acquisition of environmental knowledge is the channel that drives the effect of education on pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. Our study offers crucial policy implications as well. Chinese government has been seeking to set the country on a path to more sustainable development, focusing on the effectiveness administrative and regulatory instruments [30]. Our study provides an alternative perspective. Specifically, increasing access to general education could be an essential and effective measure to motivate pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors among a broad population. In particu- lar, the effect of general education in promoting environmental knowledge is crucial for devel- oping countries such as China, where many people have low levels of environmental knowledge. Our study might have some limitations. First, our study is based on survey responses, which can suffer from measurement error problems. For example, well-educated people may be more likely to over-claim their pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors for keeping a good image. If this is the case, the effect of education on actual pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors might be overstated. In addition, partly due to data availability, we focus on the knowledge acquisition channel. There might exist other (coexisting) channels underlying the relationship between education and pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. For example,

given the strong relationship between educational attainment and labor market outcomes, people with a higher educational attainment might be more optimistic about their future income, and thus have less concern about insufficient material needs when following a pro- environmental lifestyle. Moreover, as in general the exclusion restrictions in IV models are not testable [47], other research methods (e.g., lab and field experiments) can be useful to validate our findings. Furthermore, our study focuses on the effect of schooling education but is salient on the effect of other types of education. We leave these issues to future research. Supporting information S1 Appendix. Year of implementation of compulsory schooling law across provinces. (DOCX) S2 Appendix. Balancing test. (DOCX) Author Contributions Conceptualization: Geng Niu. Data curation: Qi Wang, Qiaoling Cai. Funding acquisition: Geng Niu. Methodology: Qi Wang, Qiaoling Cai. Project administration: Geng Niu. Resources: Geng Niu. Software: Qi Wang, Xu Gan. Supervision: Geng Niu. Writing – original draft: Xu Gan. Writing – review & editing: Geng Niu. PLOS ONE Green returns to education PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0263383 February 3, 2022 18 / 20