Huang, Chien-Chung, Irwin Garfinkel, and Jane Waldfogel. 2004. "Child Support Enforcement and Welfare Caseloads." Journal of Human Resources 39(1): 108-134.

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 significantly lower welfare caseloads. The improvement in CSE over this period reduces welfare caseloads by about 9 percent in 1999. We also discover that individual child support variables may not be good indicators of state CSE vigor and that a CSE index that includes multiple dimensions of CSE is more likely to capture the multiplicative functions of CSE.

Chien-Chung Huang is an assistant professor in the school of social work at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey; Irwin Garfinkel is Mitchell I. Ginsberg Professor of Contemporary Urban Problems in the school of social work at Columbia University; Jane Waldfogel is a professor in the school of social work at Columbia University. This research was supported by a grant from NICHD-HD19375. The authors want to thank Rebecca Blank, Wen-Jui Han, Robert Moffitt, and James Ziliak for providing data. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning August 2004 through July 2007 from Chien-Chung Huang, 536 George Street, School of Social Work, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, NJ 08901 (huangc@rci.rutgers.edu).