Can Education Enhance the General Trust of Individuals?—Based on CFPS2018 Empirical Analysis

Abstract

Education, as the most important form of human capital investment, has many influences on individual development. In addition to economic benefits, educational investment can improve the general trust of individuals and produce non-economic benefits. In the study of the causal effect of education on general trust, the estimation method of OLS has some problems such as endogeneity. In order to avoid the outcome bias caused by endogenous problems, this paper uses the implementation of compulsory education law as the instrumental variable, and uses the two-stage least squares estimation method to explore the impact of education on individuals' general trust.