Effect Of Education On Happiness:Evidence From The Chinese Compulsory Education Law

Education is a kind of human capital investment.In the traditional cognition,the level of education represents an important indicator of the level of personal development.First,education can bring higher income.We call it monetary benefit.Many researchers find that education also brings about other gains beyond income,which we call non-monetary benefits.If we divest the monetary and non-monetary benefits brought by education,the essence of education is to bring people knowledge and knowledge.This paper uses the data of Chinese General Social Survey(CGSS)2012 to explore the relationship between education and subjective well-being,and to analyze the ways in which education affects happiness through mechanism analyses.In the existing research,is still a controversial in the relationship between education and subjective well-being.Some argue education and subjective well-being are significantly positively correlated.Some argue education and subjective well-being are not correlated or negatively correlated.Rare studies use Chinese data to investigate the impact of education on happiness,and they ignore the endogeneity problem of education in the model.This paper uses Chinese data and the instrumental variables method to address the endogeneity issue of the independent variables and relies on the principles of psychology and sociology to strictly select the control variables to explore the impact of education on happiness.With the implementation of compulsory education as the instrumental variable and the use of years of schooling at the measure of education,the result show that education has a significant positive impact on subjective well-being.Through the analysis of mechanisms,I find that education enhances people's happiness through income and marriage.When controlling income or marriage,education itself does not significantly to affect happiness.This shows that education only has an indirectly affect on subjective well-being.