The impact of education level on marital satisfaction: Evidence from China

Abstract

Marriage is an extremely important part of an individual's life cycle, and marital satisfaction is an important indicator of life happiness. Using the data of China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) in 2018 based on PPS sampling method, this paper studies the impact of education level on marital satisfaction and its mechanism. The baseline regression results show that education level has a significant positive impact on marital satisfaction. The effect remains significant after addressing endogeneity with instrumental variable and CMP method. Mechanism analysis shows that education level can affect marital satisfaction through income mechanism, spiritual abundance mechanism and spousal age gap mechanism. In addition, the effect of education level varies according to gender, age and the places of residence. Improving the development level of educational, breaking the shackles of ideology and economic conditions, and actively serving all families from the community will help improve marital satisfaction and promote social harmony. This paper provides new evidence to identify the causal relationship between education level and marital satisfaction, and can enrich the literature related to the well-being of married people.

Keywords

• Education level
• Marital satisfaction
• Marital matching
• Spiritual abundance