Most of the public discussion and academic analyses of nonmarital birthrates focus on women's fertility intentions and welfare. In contrast, we argue that stricter child support enforcement may lower nonmarital birthrates by raising the costs of fatherhood for men. The analysis is based on...

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...

In response to increases in cohabitation in the United States, researchers have recently focused on differences between cohabiting and marital unions. One of the more consistent findings in this emerging literature has been a higher rate of domestic violence among cohabiting couples. A prominent...

Women have higher poverty rates than men in almost all societies (Casper et al., 1994). In this paper, we compare modern nations on this dimension. We use the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) to compare women's and men's poverty rates in eight Western industrialized countries circa the early 1990s:...