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

2. Literature review and institutional background It is well documented that education is associated with a wide range of positive outcomes [31]. While early studies focus on financial outcomes such as income and wealth, the non-pecuniary returns to education, in various domains such as job satisfaction, health, marriage, and parent- ing, are receiving increasing scholarly attention [31]. Moreover, education not only brings pri- vate returns but might also generate externalities by affecting social outcomes such as economic growth, innovation, regional crime, and tax revenue [32–34]. As environmental problems are closely related to human behavior [6,7], individuals’ pro- environmental attitudes and behaviors are expected to bring positive externalities to the soci- ety. Education might promote pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors in several ways. First, formal schooling is the primary way individuals acquire knowledge and skills [15]. As environmental concepts and topics can be complicated, knowledges and skills accumulated through education make individuals familiar with scientific terms in environment issues [15,19]. Second, and relatedly, people with a higher level of formal education have access to more sources and types of information [16]. An increased exposure to information further increases peoples’ environmental knowledge and environmental awareness. Third, based on the hierarchy of needs theory [17,35], education might help individuals meet their basic needs, and thereby enabling them to adopt a pro-environmental lifestyle to pursue a higher level of

demand [9,36]. In another word, education might increase the marginal utility of pro-environ- mental behaviors relative to the marginal utility of money. While some prior studies have explored the relation between education and pro-environ- mental behaviors [1,15,24–26], causal evidence in the context of China is still lacking. A causal analysis can provide important public policy implications. China also offers an interesting con- text to study this topic. China is facing many severe environmental problems [1–3]. As the sec- ond largest economy in the world, China’ environmental problems can have global impacts. For example, China has been ranked first of world top economies in terms of carbon dioxide emissions [37]. Since the 1980s, China began a process of education reform that aimed to gradually align the educational system with the newly emerging marketization of the economy. The Compul- sory Schooling Law (CSL) of the People’s Republic of China was passed on April 12, 1986 and officially went into effect on July 1, 1986. This was the first formal law to specify education pol- icies for the entire country [38–40]. The CSL stipulated that a nine-year compulsory education should be mandatory and free for school-age children in China and across all ethnicity groups. All children at age of six (or sometimes age seven) were required to enroll in schools. A nine- year compulsory education was divided into two stages: six-year primary education and three- year junior middle school education. After primary school, graduates can be directly admitted

into junior middle schools without general selection tests. Additionally, it was illegal to employ school-age children or adolescents for any organization or individual. Since local governments are allowed to autonomously determine the steps to implement the CSL in accordance with the economic development of the region [41], the timing of the actual implementation of the CSL varies significantly across provinces. S1 Table in S1 Appendix shows the time when the CSL was introduced at the province level. Some coastal provinces or municipalities were among the first to enforce the reform (e.g., Shanghai, Beijing and Zhejiang), while other prov- inces did not implement the new system until the early or mid-1990s (e.g., Gansu, Guangxi, Hainan, Hunan and Tibet). The overall year gap is six years between the earliest provinces and latest provinces in the sample. The CSL in China notably raised the average education level of a broad population. By 2000, China basically realized the goal of universal compulsory education, covering 85% of its PLOS ONE Green returns to education PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0263383 February 3, 2022 4 / 20