Abstract: This paper studies whether self-esteem as one of the important psychological traits affects women’s family status, using the data of National Survey on Women’s Social Status of China. The ordinal logit model is adopted for analysis, and the results reveal that self-esteem positively impacts women’ s intra-household bargaining power both in the full sample and in the sub-samples divided by ethnicities, urban-rural locations and regions. We apply propensity score matching and conditional mixed process to handle selection bias and endogeneity of self-esteem, and the results show that self-esteem enhances women’s intra-household bargaining power. The following two contributions have been made in this paper. First, this is the first paper using selfesteem to interpreter women’s family status. The paper attempts to incorporate women’s non-cognitive abilities into family behaviors. It opens up a new train of thought for the interdisciplinary study across economic disciplines, and provides new paths for gender equality and personal development that women have been pursuing. Second, we can extend the empirical findings about women’s bargaining power and self-esteem to other places which have similar cultural backgrounds to China. Thus, it provides important policy implications for those countries and regions where women are in a disadvantaged position. Overall, we contribute to the behavioral economics and provide further evidence on the causal effect of self-esteem on women’s family status.

Key words: Self-esteem, Women’s Family Status, Propensity Score Matching, Conditional Mixed Process, National Survey on Women’s Social Status of China