**13**

rural households can engage in. As explained in Section 3, crop production requires land and labor, fixed inputs in the household that face a scarcity problem<sup>3</sup> , whereas most off-farm occupations in our sample require limited to no fixed inputs: 90 percent of off-farm earners are small-scale traders. By comparing the couple’s dynamic regarding income-earning and noncognitive skills in these two sectors (subsections 4.2.1 and 4.2.2), we provide first suggestive evidence of the mechanism through which self-esteem operates: control over limited household resources. This evidence is confirmed in subsection 4.2.3 by looking directly at the channels through which self-esteem operates: comparing several fixed inputs versus variable inputs as mediators to Equation (7).

# **4.2.1 Spouses as substitutes in export-oriented agriculture**

In Table 6, we replicate the specification of Table 4 (shown again in Columns 1 and 3), adding the other spouse’s crop income-earning as an additional explanatory variable (Columns 2 and 4). We find a strong negative correlation between spouses’ income-earning: when the husband earns income from export crops in the household, the wife is much less likely to do so, and vice-versa. In Section 2, we saw that only one spouse works in commercial agriculture in the vast majority of households. Here we confirm that this affects who earns agricultural income: export crop farming engenders a competitive dynamic between spouses.

**Table 6:** Income-earning in export-oriented agriculture: substitutes

||(1)<br>Income-e<br>Fem|(2)<br>arning in e<br>ale|(3)<br>xport-orie|(4)<br>nted agriculture<br>Male|
|---|---|---|---|---|
|Self-esteem (fem)|0.03<sup>_∗∗∗_</sup>|0.03<sup>_∗∗∗_</sup>|-0.07<sup>_∗∗∗_</sup>|-0.06<sup>_∗∗∗_</sup>|
||(0.01)|(0.01)|(0.02)|(0.01)|
|Self-esteem (male)|-0.03<sup>_∗∗∗_</sup>|-0.03<sup>_∗∗∗_</sup>|0.03<sup>_∗_</sup>|0.02|
||(0.01)|(0.01)|(0.02)|(0.02)|
|Income-earning in export-oriented agriculture (male)||-0.08<sup>_∗∗∗_</sup><br>(0.02)|||
|Income-earning in export-oriented agriculture (female)||||-0.31<sup>_∗∗∗_</sup><br>(0.06)|
|Outcome mean|0.06|0.06|0.54|0.54|
|R-squared|0.045|0.068|0.123|0.144|
|Observations|1510|1510|1510|1510|

Note: Robust standard errors are reported in parentheses. All regressions include village fixed effects and the controls listed in Table 1. Self-esteem measures are corrected for acquiescence bias. Significance levels are denoted as follows: * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01.

In this context, spousal levels of self-esteem are thus substitutes in income-earning in agriculture, not complements. Table 6 also contains another important result: the self-esteem coefficients are not significantly different between Columns 1 and 3 on the one hand, and Columns 2 and 4 on the other hand.

This is reassuring in terms of direction of the causality, a topic discussed more extensively in Section 5. Imagine the reverse causality scenario: that it is not that spouse _i_ ’s self-esteem nega-

> 3While hiring additional agricultural labor is a possibility, there is a large literature on the difficulty of doing this in an effective and timely manner, particularly for women (Carranza, Donald, Jones, and Rouanet (2017); O’Sullivan, Rao, Banerjee, Gulati, and M.Vinez (2014))