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

economic literature [10–14]. In principal, education may affect household environmental behaviors in several ways. First, formal schooling is the primary way individuals acquire knowledge and skills [15]. Second, education helps people to obtain access to more sources and types of information [16], which further facilitates knowledge acquisition. Knowledge and information about environmental issues might increase individuals’ sense of environmental responsibility. In addition, education might increase the marginal utility of pro-environmental behaviors by enabling people to pursue a higher level of demand [17]. Alternately, education might decrease people’s environmental awareness if the education system directs people to be obsessed with competition and thus makes people focus on self-enhancement values [18]. In this paper, we rely on data from the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) conducted in wave 2010 for empirical analysis. A major advantage of this dataset lies in the provision of questions concerning a wide range of pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. We find a strong positive association between education and pro-environmental attitudes as well as behaviors. To alleviate the potential endogenous concern, we instrument education with per- sonal exposure to the implementation of the Compulsory Schooling Law (henceforth, CSL) in China. The two-stage least squares (2SLS) regression results confirm that education imposes a positive influence on both pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. In particular, an addi-

tional year of schooling results in an increase of 0.012 and 0.011 in the pro-environmental atti- tudes and behaviors, which are approximately 2.1% and 2% of the corresponding sample means. To test the validity of our analysis, we conduct several robustness checks. It turns out that our results are robust to placebo tests, alternative measures of pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors, and sample restrictions. We also find that the effects of education on pro-envi- ronmental attitudes and behaviors are more pronounced for males, rural residents, and low- income individuals. In addition, we examine a potential mechanism underlying the effect of schooling educa- tion on pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors, namely environmental knowledge. The willingness to alleviate environmental problem is a partial function of risk perception, which is reflected in environmental knowledge [5]. The acquisition of environmental knowledge makes individuals more informed about the situation of local and global environment, negative health effects of environmental problems, and public environmental policies. Indeed, educa- tion facilitates a better understanding of complex environmental messages such as climate change [15,19,20]. Hence, the environmental knowledge may play a major role in forming people’s pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. Thanks to the richness of the CGSS 2010 dataset, we are able to measure the level of environmental literacy among Chinese households and test whether environmental knowledge is an underlying mechanism through which for-

mal education influences pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. In particular, the CGSS 2010 asks ten true or false questions concerning fundamental concepts of environment to assess the respondents’ environmental knowledge. We observe a lack of environmental literacy among Chinese people. The proportion of correct answers to most of questions is below 62%, while the proportion of the corresponding incorrect responses or “do not know” answers is quite sizable. We also discover that people with a higher level of formal education are more likely to get higher accuracy rate in answering environmental questions. Furthermore, a medi- ation analysis is conducted to investigate whether environmental knowledge serves as a media- tor. We find that the effect of education on pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors attenuates substantially after controlling for environmental knowledge. The contributions of this paper are three-fold. First, we add to the small yet burgeoning lit- erature on household environment-related behaviors [5,7,21] by identifying the important role that formal education plays in shaping pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. Fur- thermore, we examine the pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors of households in the PLOS ONE Green returns to education PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0263383 February 3, 2022 2 / 20 researchers who meet the criteria for access to confidential data. Interested researchers can replicate our study findings in their entirety by directly obtaining the data from the third party

listed above and following the protocol. In addition, we confirm that the authors of this paper did not have any special access privileges that others would not have. Funding: This work was supported by the 111 Project of China (No. B16040) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71904160). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.