This application extends the investigators' previous work on child support policies and payments in three ways: (1) by continuing to analyze trends in child support policies, practices, and payments and their causes; (2) by undertaking new data collection and methodological work to obtain better measures of nonresident parents' (fathers') incomes; and (3) by estimating the effects of child support policies on child well-being. Most of the proposed analyses are based on extant data, including the Current Population Survey (CPS) and the Child Support Supplement to the CPS (CPS-CSS), Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), High School and Beyond Study (HSB), National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS), National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), National Longitudinal Survey-Child Supplement (NLSY-CS), and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 (NLSY97). In addition, the investigators plan to use data from administrative records of the Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) and from their own data base of state laws and practices. Finally, they plan to collect new data from a sample of New York City mothers who are eligible for child support.
