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noncognitive skills might be more relevant to its acquisition–explains a significant portion of the "battle of the sexes" relationship. Finally, we verify that self-esteem and spouse’s incomeearning are not driven by time and risk-preferences or unobservable heterogeneity correlated with both variables.

To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first study to look at how noncognitive skills impact inequality, specifically gender inequality in economic participation within the household. Our results show not only how the impact of self-esteem differs across men and women, but that it interacts with their partner’s self-esteem, and does so differentially for men and women. Moreover, this interaction appears particularly stark when economic outcomes are constrained by scarcity and market failures in input provision–an especially relevant topic in development settings. Indeed, whether spouses’ noncognitive skills are substitutes or complements varies by sector and appears to rest on how fixed the provision of inputs is at the household-level, and whether increased control over rivalrous inputs due to higher noncognitive skills leads to a de facto capture within the household.

Our results have implications for both research and policymaking. First, our results show the importance of taking into account both spouses’ noncognitive skills when examining their impact on economic outcomes. When looking at the link between economic outcomes and noncognitive skills in the presence of assortative matching, only analyzing the trait of one spouse can bias results. In our setting, a relationship emerged for men only when controlling for their wives’ self-esteem. The impact of noncognitive skills can thus be underestimated by looking at only one individual’s traits, particularly in informal sectors where the household is the relevant unit of production. This is especially important for evaluating the growing number of training programs aimed at increasing individuals’ noncognitive skills (Adhvaryu, Namrata, and Anant (2018); Fox and Kaul (2018)).

Second, and relatedly, to fully understand the poverty-reduction potential of noncognitive skills, looking at equilibrium effects through impacts on other individuals is crucial. Indeed, our results show that what matters for predicting income-earning is relative levels of noncognitive skills. Moreover, inequality in the household can be amplified through increases in the noncognitive skills of only one member. In the presence of non-unitary households, the composition of household economic participation, and who earns what matters for development outcomes beyond overall household income. For example, Duflo and Udry (2004)) show using data from Côte d’Ivoire that increases in rainfall that benefits traditionally female crops, shifts household expenditure towards food consumption and so improve nutrition of children. Thus, programs or events that unilaterally increase the noncognitive skills of one member (say, the husband) could have potential negative effects on other household members and the future generation if they result in the capture of intra-household resource allocation.

Lastly, our results imply that positive impacts of noncognitive skills, or socio-emotional skills programs, could be unlocked by an accompanying alleviation of inputs scarcity. Within agriculture, this highlights the potentially high multiplier effect of programs focused on property rights and stimulating markets for fixed inputs like land, which could attenuate the "battle of the sexes" and capture of household resources we observe. Such programs may also benefit