Professor Samantha Prince’s article to be published by the Corporate & Business Law Journal

August 2025—“Nest Eggs and Lifelines: The Overlooked Strain of Economic Volatility on 401(k) Participants,” written by Professor Samantha Prince, has been accepted for winter publication by the Arizona State University Corporate & Business Law Journal.

Many Americans rely on 401(k) plans for retirement savings. These plans do not guarantee a fixed retirement benefit; rather, the benefit is based on accumulated contributions and investment performance. When the stock market drops, so do retirement account balances. When inflation pushes living expenses higher, money does not go as far. President Trump’s retaliatory tariffs have incited a trade war creating economic volatility. Americans are worrying as they watch living costs increase and their retirement nest eggs diminish.

For retirees, the impacts may be fairly obvious, but minimum distribution requirements are often overlooked—retirees are required by law to take money from their accounts, thereby forcing them to liquidate holdings during low stock and bond market scenarios. But the scope of the impact of economic volatility goes far beyond retirees and those about to retire. Because these savings can be used for dual purposes—for retirement and sometimes current spending—those who are not ready to retire soon are also impacted.

Prince’s article discusses the overlooked impacts of economic volatility on 401(k) plan participants, including the ability to use retirement funds as lifelines, e.g., domestic abuse victim distributions, natural disaster withdrawals, etc.

This article complements Prince’s other work on 401(k) plans, including “Megacompany Employee Churn Meets 401(k) Vesting Schedules: A Sabotage on Workers’ Retirement Wealth,” published by Yale Law & Policy Review; “The Effects of 401(k) Vesting Schedules—in Numbers” (mentioned above), published by The Yale Law Journal Forum; "Benefits Transparency," published by Marquette Law Review (where she called for more transparency through mandatory disclosure of 401(k) plan details); and “Benefits Washing,” published by the Georgetown Law Journal Online (where she shows examples of companies that “wash” their 401(k) plan details, including vesting schedules).

She also has two other complementary works forthcoming: “Vesting Villainy: The Call to Ban 401(k) Vesting Schedules,” to be published by the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Business Law, and “Promoting Financial Empowerment via 401(k) Plan Domestic Abuse Victim Distributions,” to be published by the George Washington Business & Finance Law Review online.

Professor Samantha Prince is an Associate Professor of Law at Dickinson Law. She has a Master of Laws in Taxation from Georgetown University Law Center and was a partner in a regional law firm where she handled transactional matters that ranged from an initial public offering to regular representation of a publicly-traded company. A significant part of her practice was on employee benefits including retirement plan design and operation. Her expertise from practice has fueled her research enabling her to become an expert on 401(k) vesting schedules, employee benefits transparency, and gig work. In practice, most of her clients were small to medium sized businesses and entrepreneurs, including start-ups. Professor Prince brought her practice knowledge to the law school and established the Dickinson Law entrepreneurship program. She is an advisor for the Entrepreneurship Law Certificate that is available to students and is the founder and moderator of the Inside Entrepreneurship Law blog.