**3**

In this paper, we focus on intra-household inequality in income-earning. This allows us to adopt a sharper test for mechanisms. It also allows us to hone in on gender income inequality, one of the most pervasive forms of social inequality. Through this lens, intra-household inequality can be affected by how (i) the impact of self-esteem differs across men and women, (ii) interacts with their partner’s self-esteem, and (iii) manifests when economic outcomes are constrained by scarcity and market failures in input provision, a particularly relevant topic in development settings.

Thus, the question of how noncognitive skills influence inequality – in our context, self-esteem and intra-household inequality in economic specialization specifically – rests on two axes. First, how does the interplay between the genders’ noncognitive skills influence the "general equilibrium", that is the household level? Second, what determines the sign of this interplay, i.e., whether spouses’ noncognitive skills are substitutes or complements? A key to answering this question rests on the fact that noncognitive skills, and self-esteem in particular, may affect outcomes by increasing one’s ability and willingness to control production inputs and thus determine how resources are allocated among household members (Engle (1990)).

This paper uses self-esteem as a measure of noncognitive skills since it is the main noncognitive skill analyzed in the economics literature. Most importantly, self-esteem has been found to be stable and strongly predictive of future outcomes by psychologists, making it suitable for study of impacts (Donnellan, Trzesniewski, Robins, Moffitt, and Caspi (2005); Orth, Robins, Trzesniewski, Maes, and Schmitt (2009) and references cited therein). Consequently, they are part of standard measures incorporated in large longitudinal studies such as the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth in the United States, the German Socio-Economic Panel and the Household Income and the Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey. Economists researching noncognitive skills (such as Cobb-Clark and Tan (2011); Heineck and Anger (2008)) have relied on these data and the measures.

Our analysis uses data on 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’ agricultural income-earning. Our findings show that while having higher self-esteem increases one’s likelihood of earning crop income, one’s spouse’s self-esteem reduces it. Own self-esteem emerges as a more important determinant of income-earning for women, who also suffer more from their partners’ self-esteem. A one standard deviation increase in female self-esteem is associated with her husband being 12 percent less likely to earn crop income, and a one standard deviation increase in male self-esteem is associated with his wife being 33 percent less likely to earn crop income.

Conforming to gendered norms about assertiveness, a high self-esteem wife reduces husband’s agricultural income-earning regardless of his own self-esteem; whereas for wives, a high selfesteem husband is not consequential as long as she also has high self-esteem. In line with theory, we find evidence that this channel operates through a higher ability to negotiate access to the fixed inputs in agricultural production functions. Self-esteem levels seem to instead operate as complements in off-farm employment, which relies less on fixed inputs.