PROFESSOR SAMANTHA PRINCE INTERVIEWED ON THE BUSINESS SCHOLARSHIP PODCAST
December 2022 — Professor Samantha J. Prince joined host Andrew Jennings of the Business Scholarship Podcast to discuss her recent article, “Megacompany Employee Churn Meets 401(k) Vesting Schedules: A Sabotage on Workers’ Retirement Wealth.”
Jennings and Prince discussed how vesting schedules can negatively impact a worker’s ability to adequately save for retirement. Their conversation focused on how these vesting schedules interplay with extreme employee turnover at large retail and warehouse establishments. The episode further examined how the usage of vesting schedules at megacompanies can exacerbate racial disparities in intergenerational wealth accumulation.
Professor Prince’s article “Megacompany Employee Churn” was published as the lead article in the Fall, 2022 Yale Law & Policy Review. The article includes alarming data on the number of predominately low-income workers that are terminating employment before becoming fully vested in their benefits. For example, last year, Amazon and Home Depot recorded 236,751 and 129,766 participants terminating employment prior to fully vesting in their employer 401(k) contributions, respectively. To address this concerning trend, Professor Prince proposes that immediate vesting be required for all employer contributions. Alternatively, she suggests that the IRS re-configures the rules surrounding partial plan terminations, which was the subject of an article published in November, 2022 in the NYU Review on Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation.
The Business Scholarship Podcast is a weekly show that features business law professors and their recent scholarship. The Podcast includes more than 150 shows and features interdisciplinary conversations about new works in the broad world of business research. Professor Prince’s scholarship was featured on the December 20, 2022 podcast, which was Episode 166.
Professor Samantha Prince is an Assistant Professor of Law and Director of Legal Analysis & Writing 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. Most of her clients were small to medium sized businesses and entrepreneurs, including start-ups. A significant part of her practice was in employee benefits including retirement plan design and operation. An expert in entrepreneurship law, she established the Dickinson Law entrepreneurship program, 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.