Basis and determinants of compensatory allowance after divorce – COMPRES

Axe 1 Theoretical and empirical analysis of the grounds of alimony
• to study the legal and economic reasoning which may justify the granting of alimony by examining the French legal doctrinal and institutional studies and the international economic literature.
• to test if the gender inequality hypothesis only concerns the married couples, the marriage reinforcing this inequality. If this hypothesis was confirmed, it would empirically justify the alimony existence
• to identify the different compensatory regimes linked to the presence of children and or to the marital status (married couple, not married couple, couple living together with a civil partnership) in the French contemporary social protection.
Axe 2 Analysis of the determinants of the alimony claim
• to compare the legal and jurisprudential determinants between the French law and other european laws
• to determine how the parties negotiate, before the trial, the economic issues raised by the divorce, basing on a survey of lawyers.
Axe 3 Analysis of the determinants of the alimony granting and of the amount of alimony
This analysis will be based on the use of two databases made up of divorce court decisions (first instance and appeal divorce court decisions database)

Axe 4 Proposal of a decision making tool to set alimony awards
• To analyse the current guidelines, in France and abroad
• To simulate these guidelines by using our databases (axe 3)
• To propose a guideline

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This research project will contribute to the development of a research field, which is currently underdeveloped in France (and only partially explored by the international literature) even though these questions concern a lot of people due to a high rate of divorce. In an interdisciplinary framework, this project makes an analysis of law based on an interaction between economists and jurists, in order to advance the economic and legal analysis of divorce and to offer decision-making tools to public policy. This goal is all the more interesting than law and economics literature remains mainly theoretical, the empirical studies being relatively scarce, and family law remains mainly doctrinal, the empirical studies being non-existent.
It allows the economists to develop a methodology based on econometrical analyses carried out with data drawn from specific surveys made up of divorce court decisions and from national surveys, mobilizing a wide range of expertise in data collecting and data processing.
It allows the jurists to participate to the development of such methodology, ensuring that the judicial logic is taken into account and that the results are relevant for both the jurists and the economists.
The project will propose a decision making tool (an alimony guidelines) for the French judicial institution.

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For a long time the indissoluble nature of marriage and the gender distribution of social roles was met by payment of (lifetime) alimony after the divorce : the man had to provide an income for his ex-wife, independently of the amounts paid for bringing up their shared children. In France, this legal model was partially abandoned in 1975 with the setting up of a “compensatory allowance”. This meant, instead of a paying a maintenance allowance, making a payment of capital which was supposed to compensate for the disparity in standards of living at the time of separation and for the foreseeable future. This law did not however put an end to lifetime allowances and it was followed by a series of reforms aimed at both encouraging capital payments and limiting the accepted amounts. This movement is evidence of the idea of formal equality between spouses and strengthens the principle of a “single settlement” at the time of the divorce. The time of “unmarriage” is now established, but not that of the equality of the sexes : in parallel with greater participation of women in the employment market and the decline in the fertility rate, we know that investment in domestic activities and the children’s upbringing, the advancement of both professional careers and incomes for men and women remain very different.
However, whilst the social conditions for its payment seem still to exist, a compensatory allowance is rarely claimed during divorce proceedings and only 12.5% of divorce decisions include one, in parallel with a constant decrease in the amounts granted. Moreover, the criteria for decision given to judges by the Civil Code remain ambiguous and still fluctuate between the principle of alimony (ensuring the ex-wife minimum resources) and that of compensation or benefit (compensating for the wife’s loss of earnings linked to her domestic investment to the detriment of her professional investment). Consequently, it is not possible from the decisions rendered to understand the principles determining the amount of compensatory allowances. We therefore seek to know the determinants for the judge in allocating an amount, and in particular, whether or not they are linked to the existence of such inequality in the couple, given that practitioners are starting to use “scales” whose criteria remain implicit.
Bringing together researchers in law, economics and sociology with practitioners (judges, lawyers), this project aims to investigate the theoretical, empirical and political basis of the payment of such an allowance. It further proposes to scientifically analyse how the practitioners (lawyers, trial court judges, appellate court judges) confront contradictions and ambiguities when they have to make a decision granting and fixing the amount of a compensatory allowance. Finally, from the findings of the preceding analyses, the project’s ambition is to design a decision-making tool to assist in fixing the amount of a compensatory allowance (scale) which can be proposed to the Ministry of Justice.