Individual Wealth and Subjective Financial Well-being in Marriage: Resource Integration or Separation?

Economic wealth is mostly assumed to be a household-level resource that is pooled by spouses in married couples. Using comprehensive data on the individual wealth of both spouses in married couples from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study ( N = 13,623 individuals), the author tests this assumption. To this end, the associations between individuals' wealth and their spouses' wealth with individuals' subjective financial well-being are examined. Results show that women's financial well-being is equally associated with their own individual wealth and their spouses' wealth in older birth cohorts. In younger birth cohorts, women's financial well-being is more strongly associated with their own individual wealth than with their spouses' wealth. For men from all birth cohorts, their own individual wealth is more strongly related to their financial well-being than is their spouses' wealth. These findings suggest that wealth is not generally and fully pooled and that individual ownership matters within married couples in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]