Education and social preferences: quasi-experimental evidence from compulsory schooling reforms

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the effect of education on individuals’ social preferences, using data from nine waves of the European Social Survey. To address the endogeneity of education, this study exploits compulsory schooling reforms in 15 European countries. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, this study finds more education increases women’s preference for equality, whereas the effects on their altruism are insignificant. For men, the instrument does not have enough power to identify the effect of education. This study helps to understand the determinants of social preferences.

KEYWORDS:

• Social preferences
• equality
• altruism
• education

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• H52
• I26
• I28
• D63
• D64

Acknowledgments

I thank the editor and an anonymous referee for helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The results are available upon request.

² Specifically, the surveys took place in 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018. The data sets can be downloaded after registration from the website: https://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/data/round-index.html

³ The bandwidths for years of schooling, preference for equality, and altruism are 10, 15, and 13, respectively. I choose the smaller one, 10, as the common bandwidth.

⁴ The results are available upon request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [Grant No. x2jmC2181160].