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How Education Shapes Trust: Empirical Evidence from China
- 1 Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC, United States
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
The general assumption in the mainstream social capital theory states a likely causal relationship between education and trust in people, while such a conclusion might be contextual. Using the CGSS data and employing a fuzzy regression-discontinuity design where the compulsory education law (1986) in China is taken as an exogenous instrument, I find a positive correlation between education and the level of generalized trust. Further, with respect to another measure of trust—the radius of trust, I find no evidence supportive to significant correlations between education and trust in different distant social groups. However, the second-stage results do not suggest any likely causal effect from education on generalized trust or trust in different relationships, which indicates the OLS results might suffer from omitted variable bias.
Keywords
education, trust, instrumental variable, RDD
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Cite this article
Wang,X. (2024). How Education Shapes Trust: Empirical Evidence from China. Journal of Applied Economics and Policy Studies,14,31-39.
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The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
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