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

attitudes and behaviors against the birth-year level in Figs 2 and 3. Obviously, the educational level displays an upward trend; it increases from 6.66 years in 1930 to 12.23 years in 1990. More importantly, the average pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors move very closely with the level of education, suggesting strong positive correlations between education and pro- environmental attitudes and behaviors, respectively. To address the possibility that education is correlated with other individual characteristics and to gauge the impact of education on pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors more pre- cisely, we proceed with a regression framework, which is specified below. 3.3 Model specifications We estimate the relationship between education and pro-environmental attitudes and behav- iors using the following multivariate model: Yij ¼ a þ b0Educationij þ d0Xij þ gCh þ r0Cityk þ εij; ð1Þ where Yij is the pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors for individual i in province j, Edu- cationij is the years of schooling, Xij is a vector of control variables, α is the intercept, Ch is a vector of cohort dummies, and εij is the error term. Given the distinct regional segregation in China, we add city dummies Cityk in all regressions to capture city fixed effects. We are mainly interested in the coefficient of Educationij, β, which directly captures the relationship between educational attainment and pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors. We use OLS for esti- mation and report standard errors clustered at the cohort-city level to adjust for the potential

correlation of observations within the same cluster. Fig 2. Average years of schooling and pro-environmental attitudes across year of birth. Note: This figure illustrates the relationships between education and pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors across year of birth. The solid line represents the average years of schooling and the dashed lines represent the average pro-environmental attitudes (2a) and behaviors (2b) respectively. Data source is CGSS 2010. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0263383.g002 PLOS ONE Green returns to education PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0263383 February 3, 2022 8 / 20