Public enforcement of private child support obligations transfers income from non-resident parents (mostly fathers) to resident parents (mostly mothers) or, if the mother is receiving welfare, to the state. Like any other transfer it changes the incentives as it changes the incomes of parents....

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) is designed to shift more of the responsibility for poor children from government to parents. To accomplish this goal, the new law requires welfare clients to work and limits the total number of years they can...

Using the 1979 through 1998 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Women (NLSY), this paper provides evidence that women who lived in states with effective child support enforcement, measured by both strict child support legislation and high child support expenditure, were more...

Recognizing that most poor families are single-parent families, the federal welfare reform law of 1996 emphasized the responsibility of both parents to support their children. In addition to strengthening the child support enforcement system, the law included several provisions to decrease...

Child Support is an important source of income for single mothers and their children. Given the growth in single mother families and given their high rates of poverty, child support payments are of growing interest to social scientists and demographers that care about inequality and child...

This paper uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine the frequency of parent-child interaction in several areas across a range of family types. Overall, we find that few individual characteristics of mothers or fathers are consistently associated with how often...

A vast number of studies have examined the predictors of marriage and marital dissolution, and more recent studies have explored entry into and exit from cohabiting unions. At the same time, much attention has been paid to the rise in nonmarital childbearing and single motherhood. Yet, far less...

This paper uses newly available information from the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Survey to investigate how unmarried mothers' and fathers' expectations about marriage, in addition to their socio-economic and demographic characteristics, are related to transitions to marriage in the...

We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to describe the living arrangements of new, unwed mothers and to examine the determinants of those living arrangements. Our analysis goes beyond previous studies in several ways. First, we examine a wide diversity of living...