Who Converges Toward Whom? The Direction of Risk-Attitude Convergence within Couples

Individual risk attitudes shape household financial decisions, yet most models treat these attitudes as fixed individual traits. Studies of spousal risk attitudes have documented that partners' preferences are correlated, but whether preferences converge within marriage, and who converges toward whom, remains an open question. We fill this gap using a balanced panel of 2,331 Korean married couples (LIPS, 2004 and 2007). We show that spouses' risk attitudes are positively matched, with a within-couple correlation of about 0.2. We estimate the husband-to-wife and wife-to-husband transmission channels separately. Their relative strength is systematically related to the wife's economic position. When the wife works, her risk attitudes stop responding to her husband's baseline while his begin to respond to hers; when she out-earns him, her responsiveness to his baseline falls sharply. This opposite-sign pattern is difficult to generate through common shocks or differential mean reversion alone. The results are consistent with a bargaining account in which the same economic variables that the collective-household literature identifies as determinants of resource allocation also govern the direction of preference convergence.