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# **7 Discussion**

In this paper, we examine the relationship between noncognitive skills and intra-household inequality in economic participation. As most of the global poor earn a living from agriculture, we focus on what determines who in the household is the agricultural income-earner; that is, participates in commercial as opposed to subsistence agriculture. This distinction is economically meaningful, as commercial agriculture is the most lucrative source of income earning among farmers in our rural setting.

Our analysis uses measures of men’s and women’s self-esteem in 1 _,_ 511 farmer couples in Côte d’Ivoire to determine how relative self-esteem levels in the household affect spouses’ participation in agriculture. Consistent with the existing literature, our findings show a positive correlation between one’s own noncognitive skills and one’s income-earning in all economic activities, including in agriculture. This also holds for earned income, highlighting the importance of internal, psychological drivers of rural poverty. We depart from the existing literature by identifying a "battle of the sexes" in agriculture specifically, in which one spouse’s selfesteem is negatively related to the likelihood of the other earning agricultural income. This dynamic matters more for women: their noncognitive skills are a more important determinant of own income-earning, and they are more negatively affected by their spouse’s noncognitive skills compared to men.

One potential worry is that our results are driven entirely by other factors that increase the likelihood of income-earning, which in turn increases noncognitive skills. While a causal link from noncognitive skills to economic participation has been shown in past studies, this reverse hypothesis may still be true in our setting–despite our holding constant a variety of sociodemographic characteristics and using within-village variation to identify effects. This paper provides suggestive evidence that results are not driven by reverse causality by showing that the "battle of the sexes" pattern is driven by individuals who are in their middle age, during which self-esteem is considered most stable and is thus less likely to be affected by external conditions.

To further shed light on the mechanism behind the observed relationship, we turn to the theory. A central way in which a noncognitive skills, and self-esteem in particular, may affect outcomes is by increasing one’s ability and willingness to control intermediate inputs to production (Engle (1990)). We hypothesize that this ability is most relevant in the agriculture sector, which is marked by a higher prevalence of fixed and rivalrous inputs, such as land. This is especially true given that the main alternative to farming in our rural context is small-scale trading and commerce, which requires less land and household labor.

We find that the observed "battle of the sexes" pattern is unique to the agriculture sector, driven by higher-value export-oriented agriculture. While in agriculture we observe a substitution effect between spouses’ income-earning, the wife’s and husband’s income-earning positively relate to each other in off-farm employment. Less-rivalrous inputs, such as knowledge, liquidity and assets, do not mediate the self-esteem and income-earning relationship in agriculture. Control over land does. In particular, land that has been bought or exchanged–and thus, where