Volume 36, Number 2 (Spring) 2001
Freeman, Richard B., and Jane Waldfogel. 2001. "Dunning Delinquent Dads: The Effects of Child Support Enforcement Policy on Child Support Receipt by Never Married Women." Journal of Human Resources 36(2): 207-225.
Using data from administrative records, the Survey of Income and Program Participation, and the Current Population Survey, we find that the Proportion of never married mothers receiving child support rose sharply in the 1980s and 1990s. Using within-state variation over time, we estimate that increased government expenditures on child support are responsible for about one quarter of the upward trend in Child support receipt. Our results show that child support expenditures and legislation work best in tandem. States that both increased expenditures and adopted tougher laws experienced the largest increase in the proportion of never married mother families receiving support.
Richard Freeman is Herbert Ascherman Professor of Economics at Harvard University, the program Director for Labor Studies at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and Co-Director of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. Jane Waldfogel is Associate Professor of Social Work and Public Affairs at Columbia University School of Social Work and Research Associate at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Association of Public Policy and Management conference in Washington, D.C., in November 1997. The authors would like to thank Mark Turner and other participants at the conference, as well as two anonymous referees, for helpful comments. They are grateful Wen-Jui Han and Chien-Chung Huang for excellent research assistance. We are also grateful to Anne Case for providing us with political variables, and to Irwin Garfinkel for providing us with child support legislative variables and for very helpful conversations about those variables. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning November 2001 through October 2004 from Jane Waldfogel, Columbia University School of Social Work, 622 W. 113th Street, New York, NY 10025, jw205@columbia.edu.
© 2002 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X