Child Support, Welfare Dependency, and Poverty.

Female-headed families have among the highest poverty rates of any major demographic group in the United States. The purpose of this paperis to investigate empirically the effectiveness of current child-support enforcement policies and to determine their role in reducing poverty and welfare dependency. A special supplement to the April 1982 Current Population Survey provides the data for the analysis. The results indicate that child support enforce-ment may represent an effective means for re-ducing welfare program costs but isunlikely to have a dramatic effect on either welfare de-pendency or poverty. Copyright 1986 by American Economic Association.