SpaceX lockup expiration today will create a lot of marriages and divorces?

How’s SpaceX stock doing today? Up 6% says the Google? Even if it had sagged to Morningstar’s number (see SpaceX is worth $63/share according to the most expert experts), there would still be a lot of newly minted rich people due to the expiration of employee lockups. It’s almost as though they won the lottery, which raises the question… Can one predict the effects of winning the lottery?

Four academics have tried:

We estimate the effects of large, positive wealth shocks on marriage and fertility among Swedish lottery players. For male winners, wealth increases marriage formation and fertility and likely reduces divorce risk. For female winners, the only clear effect is a higher short-run (but not long-run) divorce risk. The gendered treatment effects are often similar to income gradients. Our findings align with models in which wives derive greater marginal utility from consumption when single than when married, whereas the opposite holds for husbands—but only if marital property is divided unequally upon divorce. We provide descriptive evidence consistent with such unequal division.

If the academics are correct, we should expect wedding bells for some of the male employees of SpaceX and that the female employees will be filing more divorce lawsuits than they otherwise would have.

(The “if marital property is divided unequally” phrase in the above, I think, refers to prenuptial agreements in which property is kept separate. Sweden’s divorce law allows for the possibility that a lottery prize could be joint property, in which case a female partner of a male winner could cash out via initiating a divorce and also the possibility that a man’s lottery prize could belong to him alone, in which case the female partner’s only way to spend some of it would be to stay married.)

Related:

• “‘These boots are made for walking’: why most divorce filers are women” (Brinig and Allen 2000), American Law and Economics Review, Volume 2, Issue 1