This research will contribute to a better understanding of the economic consequences of the rapid rise in single-parent families headed by a woman. Such families are disproportionately poor and often have little choice but to rely upon the welfare system. We hypothesize that child support payments significantly improve the economic well-being of these father-absent families. A better understanding of the determinants of child support payments will help policymakers reform guidelines used by the legal system in awarding and enforcing child support payments. This project will examine the determinants of child support, and assess some of its short-run and long-run consequences for related decisions made by the women and their children.
The specific aims are (1) to examine the determinants of child support, the probability of remarriage, and labor force participation for small subsets of the population of mothers with children from an absent father that have not been studied separately before--blacks and never married mothers; (2) to test the hypothesis that child support enforcement improves the likelihood that women receive child support from absent fathers and receive more of the support due them; (3) to test the hypothesis that the award and receipt of child support increases the labor supply and earnings of mothers in single-parent families; and (4) to test the hypothesis that the receipt of child support reduces any negative effect of living in a father-absent family on the educational attainment of children. The methodology involves estimating equations on the award and receipt of child support that combine the legal and economic determinants into a unified framework. The probability of remarriage and labor force participation will be estimated with high logistic models in which child support measures are included as independent variables. The Heckman technique will be used to correct for sample selection bias in an earnings equation, to predict earnings needed to estimate hours and weeks worked equations. Logistic models will be used to estimate the probability of a child completing high school or going on to college as a function of family structure and the receipt of child support.
| Beller, A H; Graham, J W (1986) Child support awards: differentials and trends by race and marital status. Demography 23:231-45 |
