**11**

esteem of one spouse, the lower the probability that the other earns income from agriculture. The effects are large, with a one standard deviation increase in the wife’s self-esteem making the husband 12 percent less likely to earn crop income, and with a one standard deviation increase in the husband’s self-esteem making the wife 33 percent less likely to earn crop income. The magnitude of the absolute effect is larger for wives, and even more so proportionally, given substantially lower baseline levels. This implies that women’s income-earning is more sensitive to their spouse’s self-esteem. Interestingly, results are not symmetric for both genders. Specifically, husbands of high self-esteem women are less likely to earn crop income, regardless of their own self-esteem; whereas for wives, a high self-esteem husband is not consequential as long as she also has high self-esteem.<sup>2</sup> Because there is assortative matching on self-esteem within couples (i.e., wives and husbands tend to have similar self-esteem levels as shown in Figure 1), the wife’s self-esteem is a confounding factor playing against the husband’s self-esteem when looking just at the relationship between the husband’s crop income-earning and his own self-esteem. Indeed, in Column 4, the husband’s self-esteem does not correlate significantly with his income-earning. The correlation only becomes positive when controlling for his wife’s self-esteem (Column 6). Again, due to assortative matching, the negative correlation between the husband’s self-esteem and the wife’s crop income-earning (Column 2) is only significant when controlling for her self-esteem (Column 3).

This has important analytical implications. When looking at the link between economic outcomes and noncognitive skills, in the presence of assortative matching, only looking at the trait of one spouse can bias results. All these results are robust to a logit specification (available upon request).

**Table 3:** "Battle of the sexes" in agriculture

||(1)|(2)<br>Inco<br>Female|(3)<br>me-earni|(4)<br>ng in agric|(5)<br>ulture<br>Male|(6)|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|Self-esteem (fem)|0.02<sup>_∗_</sup>||0.02<sup>_∗∗_</sup>|-0.06<sup>_∗∗∗_</sup>||-0.07<sup>_∗∗∗_</sup>|
||(0.01)||(0.01)|(0.01)||(0.02)|
|Self-esteem (male)||-0.02|-0.03<sup>_∗∗_</sup>||0.01|0.04<sup>_∗∗_</sup>|
|||(0.01)|(0.01)||(0.02)|(0.02)|
|Outcome mean|0.09|0.09|0.09|0.58|0.58|0.58|
|R-squared|0.025|0.024|0.031|0.123|0.106|0.127|
|Observations|1510|1510|1510|1510|1510|1510|

Note: Robust standard errors are reported in parentheses. All regressions include village fixed effects and controls for female household head (dummy), number of adults, number of children, polygamous relationship (dummy), matrilineal ethnicity (dummy), female age, male age, female years of schooling, male years of schooling, share of plots owned, average distance to plots (in minutes), log of farm size, asset index, liquidity in case of emergency (in US$), and having experienced any shock in the previous 12 months (dummy). Self-esteem measures are corrected for acquiescence bias. Significance levels are denoted as follows: * p<0.10, ** p<0.05, *** p<0.01.

> 2For the husband’s crop income-earning, the negative correlation with female self-esteem is greater than the positive correlation with his own self-esteem, whereas for wife’s crop income-earning, the positive coefficient on her own self-esteem and the negative coefficient on her husband’s self-esteem are of the same magnitude. In another specification, we explain income-earning by the difference in self-esteem between spouses, and the absolute value of the wife’s self-esteem. This gives consistent results (available upon request).