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Title: Signals of Child Achievement as Determinants of Child Support
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Aughinbaugh, Alison Aileen |
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Signals of Child Achievement as Determinants of Child Support Presented: New Orleans, LA, American Economic Association Meeting, January 2001 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: American Economic Association Keyword(s): Child Support; Family Income; Mothers, Income; Parents, Non-Custodial; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT); Transfers, Financial; Transfers, Parental Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. For children from non-intact households, the receipt of an additional dollar of child support has been found to have benefits that are several times larger than those of mother's earnings or family income (John W. Graham et al., 1994; Virginia W. Knox, 1996; Laura M. Argys et al., 1998). The obvious explanation is that custodians who receive child support or noncustodians who pay child support differ from those who do not in unobserved ways. In this case, the child-support variable will pick up the effects of omitted variables with which it is correlated. Graham et al. (1994) and Knox (1996) attempt to correct for unobserved heterogeneity using instrumental variables. Their results show that the coefficient estimate on child-support income is much larger than that on family income. However, because of the imprecision of the estimates, one cannot conclude that child support has a benefit to children that is significantly larger than that of other income. This paper examines an alternative reason for the finding that child support has a larger impact on children than other dollars: child-support transfers and investments in children are strategically linked. A current payment of child support by a noncustodial parent (NCP) may depend on the past investments in the child by the custodial parent (CP). Because a NCP is unlikely to have complete information about investments in his child, he may use information about the child's achievement as a signal of how well the CP cares for the child. This would provide the CP with an incentive to invest more in the child than she would otherwise. This hypothesis is tested by estimating the effect of child achievement on the probability that a custodial parent receives child support and on the amount of child support received using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Mother-Child Supplement. No previous estimation of child support has included measures of child achievement. |
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Bibliography Citation
Aughinbaugh, Alison Aileen. "Signals of Child Achievement as Determinants of Child Support." Presented: New Orleans, LA, American Economic Association Meeting, January 2001. |