New York: Frustrated by your spouse's spending habits?
It might be why you married them, according to a working paper titled Fatal (Fiscal) Attraction by professors of the Wharton School of Finance and Northwestern University.
"Surveys of married adults suggest that opposites attract when it comes to emotional reactions toward spending," Wharton's Scott Rick and Deborah Small and Northwestern's Eli Finkel said in the paper.
They found that people who generally spend less than they would ideally like to spend, and those who spend more than they would like to tend to marry each other.
George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, in a separate study called Tightwads and Spendthrifts published last year, found that the degree people feel of a "pain of paying" determines if they are a "tightwad" or a "spendthrift."
Loewenstein's study, conducted with Wharton's Rick and Carnegie Mellon doctoral student Cynthia Cryder, found that the extent to which people said they found a pain of paying strongly predicted their savings and credit card debt, but were unrelated to income.
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