This paper studies how a shift in U.S. divorce law in the 1970s–1980s changed married couples’ work and well‑being. The author compares the old “Title‑Based Regime” (TBR), where assets went to whoever legally owned them, with the later “Equitable Distribution Regime” (EDR), where courts more fairly divide marital assets. Using U.S. household panel data, the paper finds that both husbands and wives increased labor supply after states adopted EDR. The rise in women’s labor supply attributable to EDR is reported as roughly 30% of the total increase in female labor force participation between 1950 and 2019 in the data used here.

Under the TBR, couples could use formal ownership — who held the title — as a way to lock in how assets would be split if they divorced. That made the economic consequences of divorce more predictable inside the household. The EDR replaced that predictability with a court decision that can be hard for couples to forecast. Losing the couple’s ability to commit to a future division of assets and gaining an unpredictable court judgment created a new source of financial uncertainty for married households.

The paper explains how that uncertainty led couples to “self‑insure.” Faced with a less certain outcome from divorce, households respond by saving more and by working more during marriage so they have resources if things go wrong. The author lays out two related channels: one is that an enforced rule (for example, equal splits) may not match the division the couple would have chosen, so they save or work more to protect themselves; the other is that an unpredictable court share adds randomness, which also motivates precautionary saving. Theoretical work in the paper uses a standard risk‑aversion utility form called constant relative risk aversion (CRRA). In that framework the direction of the effect depends on a parameter that measures how strongly people increase saving when risk rises (often called prudence), but for plausible values the precautionary saving explanation fits the observed increase in labor supply.