Aizer, Anna, and Sara McLanahan. 2006. “The Impact of Child Support Enforcement on Fertility, Parental Investments, and Child Well-Being.” Journal of Human Resources 41(1): 28–45.
Increasing the probability of paying child support, in addition to increasing resources available for investment in children, also may alter the incentives faced by men to have children out of wedlock. We find that strengthening child support enforcement leads men to have fewer out-of-wedlock births and among those who do become fathers, to do so with more educated women and those with a higher propensity to invest in children. Thus, policies that compel men to pay child support may affect child outcomes through two pathways: an increase in financial resources and a birth selection process.
Anna Aizer is a professor of economics at Brown University and NBER; Sara McLanahan is a professor of economics at Princeton University. The authors would like to thank Jeanette Chung, Janet Currie, Pedro Dal Bó, Angie Fertig, Len Lopoo, Irv Garfinkel, Princeton University seminar participants, and the MacArthur Network on the Family and the Economy for useful comments. The authors would also like to thank the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing at Princeton University which is supported by grant 5 R01 HD36916 from the NICHD and the Office of Population Research at Princeton University which is supported by grant 5 P30 HD32030 from the NICHD and the Center for Health and Well-being at Princeton University. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning August 2006 through July 2009 from Anna Aizer, Brown University Department of Economics, 64 Waterman Street, Providence, RI 02912 or by emailing aizer@brown.edu.