LAW & ECONOMICS WORKSHOP SERIES
presents
Jennifer Bennett Shinall
Vanderbilt University Law School
Opting Out and the Division of Marital Assets
Tuesday, November 1, 2016
4:10 – 5.45
Solarium (room FA2) - Falconer Hall
84 Queen's Park
The legal regime governing divorce and allocation of marital assets has substantial effects on numerous dimensions of marriage including decisions to marry, divorce, save, allocate resources, and participate in the labor market. Prenuptial contracts remain rare, so marital assets in most divorces are divided according to state laws, which requires equitable division in thirty-nine states and equal division in the remaining eleven states. Legal decisionmakers in states requiring equitable division consider each party’s current earnings and future earnings potential, balancing the contributions of each party to building the value of tangible assets and to the household. Drawing on economic theories of marriage and divorce, the share of marital assets awarded to a non-breadwinning spouse should be positively related to her education. The investments in her spouse’s human capital should lead to the 50 – 50 split associated with equal division allocation, as that allocation is based on the assumption of equal partnership and equal rewards. To test whether the general population agrees with these economic arguments, we fielded an experimental vignette study on 3,017 volunteers, asking them to divide the marital assets equitably between a breadwinning husband and non-breadwinning wife. We varied the education level of the non-breadwinning wife as well as the value of the marital estate. We find that subjects consistently favor the husband, with less than 50 percent of assets awarded to the wife, regardless of the wife’s education level and the level of marital assets. Male subjects also consistently award lower shares than female subjects. However, male subjects, but not female subjects, award a larger share to the more educated wife. Similar to the marriage premium that favors men, we find that asset division upon divorce likewise favors men.
Jennifer Bennett Shinall’s research interests are employment law, labor economics, and legal and economic history. Her research examines the effects of obesity on the labor market and how the legal system can address these effects. Other current research focuses on the employment effects of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act of 2008, and implicit forms of discriminatory bias against women. Professor Shinall was the first graduate of the Ph.D. Program in Law and Economics at Vanderbilt University. Before returning to Vanderbilt as a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Law and Economics in 2013, Professor Shinall was a clerk for Judge John Tinder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. She earned an A.B. in economics and history at Harvard University and her J.D. and Ph.D. in law and economics at Vanderbilt Law School, where she served as senior articles editor for Vanderbilt Law Review and was elected to the Order of the Coif. Professor Shinall teaches Employment Law and Employment Discrimination Law to J.D. students. She also teaches Labor Markets and Human Resources and the Ph.D. Workshop for the Ph.D. Program in Law and Economics.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
