Public enforcement of private child support obligations transfers income from non-resident parents (mostly fathers) to resident parents (mostly mothers) or, if the mother is receiving welfare, to the state. Like any other transfer it changes the incentives as it changes the incomes of parents....

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) is designed to shift more of the responsibility for poor children from government to parents. To accomplish this goal, the new law requires welfare clients to work and limits the total number of years they can...

Using the 1979 through 1998 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Women (NLSY), this paper provides evidence that women who lived in states with effective child support enforcement, measured by both strict child support legislation and high child support expenditure, were more...

Women have higher poverty rates than men in almost all societies (Casper et al., 1994). In this paper, we compare modern nations on this dimension. We use the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) to compare women's and men's poverty rates in eight Western industrialized countries circa the early 1990s:...

With welfare reauthorization imminent, many conservative politicians are suggesting that although states have been successful at moving welfare mothers into paid employment, they have paid too little attention to the second goal of welfare reform - encouraging the formation of two-parent...

Work requirements and time limits for welfare recipients, which are being implemented on a large scale as a result of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, will no doubt have repercussions for poor mothers and their children. It is not clear, however, exactly what these...

A vast number of studies have examined the predictors of marriage and marital dissolution, and more recent studies have explored entry into and exit from cohabiting unions. At the same time, much attention has been paid to the rise in nonmarital childbearing and single motherhood. Yet, far less...

This paper uses newly available information from the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Survey to investigate how unmarried mothers' and fathers' expectations about marriage, in addition to their socio-economic and demographic characteristics, are related to transitions to marriage in the...

We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to describe the living arrangements of new, unwed mothers and to examine the determinants of those living arrangements. Our analysis goes beyond previous studies in several ways. First, we examine a wide diversity of living...