This paper examines the effects of stronger child support enforcement and declines in welfare benefits on changes in non-marital childbearing between 1980 and 1996. Economic theory suggests that stricter child support enforcement will increase the costs of children for unwed fathers, making them...

Although there is a large body of research devoted to the issue of the determinants of welfare caseloads, none of these studies has incorporated the effects of child support enforcement (CSE). We employ annual state panel data from 1980 to 1999 and find that states with more effective CSE have...

Much of the literature on welfare dynamics has focused on the effects of recipient characteristics and state-level characteristics such as welfare benefits and economic conditions; there has been very little analysis on the effects of child support. This paper, using the 1979-1996 National...

“Doubling up” (living with relatives or nonkin) is a common source of support for low-income families, yet no study to date has estimated its economic value relative to other types of public and private support. Using longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, we...

The epidemiologic transition theory presented first by Omran [Omram, A. R. (1971) The epidemiologic transition: a theory of the epidemiology of population change, Mildbank Quarterly 49(4), 509-538] was designed to explain global trends in the dynamic relationship between epidemiological...