**4**

Our results have implications for future policy making and research. First, our results show that the impact of noncognitive skills can be underestimated when looking at only one individual in the household, particularly in informal sectors where the household is the relevant unit of production. This insight has important implications for evaluating the growing number of training programs aimed at increasing individual noncognitive skills. Second, our results show that what matters for predicting income-earning is the relative level of noncognitive skills within the household. Looking at equilibrium effects through impacts on other individuals is crucial to fully understand the poverty-reduction potential of noncognitive skills. Lastly, our results imply that positive impacts of noncognitive skills could be enhanced by an accompanying alleviation of inputs scarcity.

The remainder of the paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 introduces the data and presents summary statistics. The conceptual framework is outlined in Section 3, while Section 4 presents our main results on the link between spouses’ self-esteem and income-earning and its mechanisms. Section 5 presents evidence on the direction of causality, while Section 6 provides additional results with an alternative outcome specification. Section 7 concludes with policy implications and suggestions for further research.

# **2 Context**

This paper uses data on farmer couples collected by the authors in June-July 2016. The survey formed the baseline of a randomized controlled trial to assess the impact of improving farmers’ access to technologies and markets. The survey elicited information on the self-esteem, agricultural self-efficacy and time and risk preferences of the farmers that applied to the program, as well as of their spouses. The spouses were asked these modules separately and privately. The household survey also collected information on couples’ socio-demographic characteristics and income generating activities, along with modules on expenditures, saving, credit, transfers and social networks, shocks and coping strategies, assets and food security. Table 1 shows descriptive statistics for our sample.

Our primary outcome of interest is income-earning in agriculture. For the rural households in Côte d’Ivoire we surveyed, the scope for engaging in the formal sector is limited and virtually all households are engaged in some sort of agriculture. The choice households and individuals face is the mix of subsistence agriculture, commercial agriculture and self-employment they engage in – with the key choice for farming households being who engages in highervalue export-oriented agriculture. In what follows, we define cash crops as any crops that households report selling, and export-oriented agriculture as the subgroup consisting of Côte d’Ivoire’s main export crops: cashew, cocoa, coffee, palm oil and rubber. Export crop farming is prevalent in our context: of the 19 Sub-Saharan African countries studied in Chauvin, Mulangu, and Porto (2012), Côte d’Ivoire has the second-highest agriculture income share coming from non-staple food other than cereals or fruits and vegetables, both for urban households (57 _._ 64 percent) and rural households (62 _._ 12 percent).

In this study, self-esteem was measured using the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, which is composed of 10 questions that capture one’s feelings of self-worth (see A.1 in the Appendix for the