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

“Not at all”, “Occasionally”, and “Frequently” answers to each of the six pro-environmental behaviors questions. Overall, there are significant variations in respondents’ pro-environmen- tal attitudes. To protect the environment, respondents are more willing to pay higher prices than paying higher taxes and lowering living standard. Panel B of Table 1 shows that the majority of Chinese respondents carry out pro-environmental behaviors on a regular basis. Following the previous literature [26], we aggregate the three attitudes questions into one variable. For each of the three attitude questions, respondents are asked to provide answers on a five-point scale from “Extremely unwilling to” (i) to “Extremely willing to” (v), with a higher value indicating a stronger pro-environmental attitude. By summing answers to the three questions together, we obtain a variable with a maximum score of 15. We divide this variable by 15 to construct the variable Pro-environmental attitudes, which has a maximum score of one. Similarly, we aggregate the six behavior questions into one variable. For each of the six behavior questions, respondents provide answers on a three-point scale, with a higher value indicating a higher intensity of pro-environmental behaviors. We construct the variable Pro- environmental behaviors by summing answers to the six behavior questions and divide the result by 18, which makes the variable has a maximum value of one. All else being equal, indi- viduals who have higher values of pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors are likely to

think and behave in a more environmentally friendly manner. 3.2.2 Other variables. The main explanatory variable for our analysis is Education, which is defined as the years of schooling that the respondent receives as in the literature [38,42]. Since the CGSS does not directly ask for the years of schooling, we quantify Education by assigning zero to being without schooling, six years to a primary school education, nine years to a junior high school education, twelve years to a senior high school education, thirteen years to a vocational school education, fifteen years to a junior college education, sixteen years Fig 1. School enrollment rate in China 1981–2006. Note: This figure illustrates the school enrollment rate in China over the period between 1981 and 2006. The solid line represents the primary school enrollment rate and the dashed line represents the junior high school enrollment rate. Data source is National Bureau of Statistics of China. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0263383.g001 PLOS ONE Green returns to education PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0263383 February 3, 2022 6 / 20