Abstract
Education is viewed as a human right, a powerful chauffeur of development and a key tool that would reach the macroeconomic objectives and improve an individual’s life. Arguably, this holds true theoretically. However, empirical evidence regarding the relationship between education and subjective well-being tends to yield varied results ranging from significant positive effects to negative or neutral effects. There is a lack of a clear-cut understanding and consensus with regard to the relationship between education and subjective well-being (Botha, 2014; Kristoffersen, 2018; Binder &Coad, 2011). Therefore, it is essential to further examine this relationship to ascertain what exact association exists between education and subjective well-being. The study investigates the relationship between subjective well-being and education in 117 countries worldwide, with special reference to any changes in the association between education indicators such as enrolment rates, literacy rates, expected years of schooling, and average years of schooling for adults on subjective well-being. To this end, the present study applies a panel quantile estimation technique on a dataset from 117 countries between 2009 and 2019. The panel quantile regression estimation enables the estimation of heterogeneous effects across different quantiles of the conditional distribution of the dependent variable. The differential effect is tested by using the Wald test. The results of the study indicate that tertiary education enrolment, expected years of schooling, and average years of schooling for adults have a significant and positive relationship with life satisfaction across all quantiles. In particular, in countries where residents are typically highly satisfied with life, enrolment in tertiary education leads to relatively higher subjective well-being scores than other proxies. In addition, in countries where residents are usually moderately satisfied with life, the results show that an increase in the average years of schooling for adults results in a substantial increase in their subjective well-being score. In countries where residents are generally least satisfied with life, the results of this study show that, in terms of magnitude, when expected years of schooling increase by an additional year, the subjective well-being score increases the most compared to other countries. Governments need to consider education when designing a policy that aims to improve the life satisfaction of its residents. In conclusion the effectiveness of the education policy in improving subjective well-being depends not only on the life satisfaction level of the country, but also on the type of education proxy.
Keywords: Subjective well-being, life satisfaction, education, quantile regression, cross-country, quantile, education proxies.