Search Results

Title: The Impact of Child Support on Fertility, Parental Investments and Child Well-Being
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Aizer, Anna
McLanahan, Sara S.
The Impact of Child Support on Fertility, Parental Investments and Child Well-Being
Working Paper, Department of Economics, Brown University, April 2004
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Department of Economics, Brown University
Keyword(s): Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC); Child Support; Childbearing, Premarital/Nonmarital; Fathers, Absence; Fertility

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

In the first part of this paper we discuss the incentives generated by stricter child support enforcement policies, how they affect the fertility of single women, and how they change the average underlying characteristics of single mothers. The discussion incorporates the interaction between state policies of stricter child support enforcement and the major public program serving single women with children: the AFDC program. We predict that under certain assumptions, increasing the probability that fathers will be required to pay child support results in 1) fewer children born to mothers who are most likely to use AFDC, and 2) more births to women with a higher underlying propensity to invest in children.

In the second part of this paper we use multiple datasets to provide empirical support for the two predictions of the model and we employ an identification strategy that enables us to isolate this particular mechanism empirically. First, we use annual data on state expenditures for child support enforcement and on natality for the period 1985-1994 to estimate the impact of increasing the probability that fathers will have to pay child support on non-marital child bearing and maternal investments in children born outside marriage. We find that more stringent child support enforcement results in fewer births, especially among less educated single women, and conditional on education, a greater use of early prenatal care (a measure of the underlying propensity to invest in children) both of which suggest positive selection on mother quality....We also estimate a duration model of time to first birth for a cohort of young women of child-bearing age from the NLSY79 and find that single mothers in states with stricter child support enforcement delay the time until first birth.

Bibliography Citation
Aizer, Anna and Sara S. McLanahan. "The Impact of Child Support on Fertility, Parental Investments and Child Well-Being." Working Paper, Department of Economics, Brown University, April 2004.