Volume 36, Number 2 (Spring) 2001
Argys, Laura M., H. Elizabeth Peters, and Donald M. Waldman. 2001. "Can the Family Support Act Put Some Life Back Into Deadbeat Dads? An Analysis of Child-Support Guidelines, Award Rates, and Levels." Journal of Human Resources 36(2):226-252.
Federal legislation mandates the use of child-support guidelines to improve adequacy and horizontal equity of child-support awards. Using state guideline formulas, and a sample of women drawn from the NLSY we compare the effects of guidelines on children born out of wedlock versus children whose parents divorced or separated. Our analyses indicate that guidelines increase the probability of child-support awards for children born out of wedlock. Guidelines also reduce variation in awards by eliminating outliers, not by equalizing awards across the entire distribution. Awards for high-income divorced or separated fathers fall substantially below the guideline amount.
Laura M. Argys is an associate professor of economics at the University of Colorado-Denver. H. Elizabeth Peters is an associate professor in Public Policy and Management at Cornell University. Donald M. Waldman is a professor of economics at the University of Colorado-Boulder. The work on this paper has been supported by the NICHD Family and Child Well-Being Research Network, grant #HD30944. The authors would like to thank Robert Haveman and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. They would also like to thank David Burchfield, Sue Eshleman, Jennifer Key, Jane Venohr, and Benjamin Witoonchart for excellent research assistance. They are grateful to Andrea Beller, Elaine Sorensen and Robert Williams for consultation on guidelines, to Leslie Whittington for providing a program to calculate federal tax rates. The NLSY79 data used in this article can be obtained by agreement with the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Policy variables can be obtained beginning November 2001 through October 2004 from Laura Argys, Department of Economics, CB 181, P.O. Box 173364, University of Colorado-Denver, Denver, CO 80217-3364.
© 2002 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X