To What Extent Is Education Associated with Greater Household Net Worth for Males in Young Generation

Abstract

Existing studies have mainly examined the impact of education level on income for the general population and lacked a detailed exploration of a single group. In order to fill the gap in the impact of educational attainment on income levels in the young male population and verify whether this impact was exhibited by self-esteem and living areas, this paper uses a dataset from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) questionnaire and sets educational attainment(educ) as the independent variable, marital status, residential zone(urban) as the control variables as well as household wealth(net_worth1000) for dependent variable. At the same time, multiple linear regression, threshold regression, and multilevel regression are adopted in this study to reveal the plausibility and generalizability of the effect of educational attainment on household wealth in the young male population. Under 5% significant level, The regression results are as follows: In MLR, co = 11.3422,p-value = 0.000;In TR, co =6.7053, p-value= 0.000 for categories below threshold as well as co = 12.9303,p-value = 0.001 for groups above threshold, revealing impact on household wealth may be exhibited by self-esteem; In MR, coefficient is 11.481,ICC = 0.0068,implying that effect of education on wealth is not demonstrated through distinction of living areas. These outcomes demonstrate that the positive effect of educational attainment on household wealth shows a very high level of significance among young men, but the strength of the effect varies with fluctuations in the individual's level of self-esteem.