This paper investigates the effect of relative income on marriage. Accounting flexibly for absolute income, the ratio between a man’s income and a local reference group median is a strong predictor of marital status, but only for low-income men. Relative income affects marriage even among...

Private educational firms claimed to be able to substantially increase the reading and mathematics achievement test scores of disadvantaged students. The OEO Performance Contracting Experiment tested this claim. Although analysis of experimental effects is complicated by imperfect matching of...

The economic impact of a child support assurance system (CSAS) is simulated with microdata on custodial families in Wisconsin. The CSAS includes a uniform child support standard, automatic wage withholding, a minimum child support benefit, and wage subsidy for eligible families. The simulation...

This paper specifies and estimates a structural model in which the decision to purchase market child care-and the quality purchased-is made simultaneously with the employment decision of the mother. Separate analyses are performed for married mothers and single mothers. The structural estimates...

We examine the impacts on child support payments of explicitly indexing orders to noncustodial parents' incomes by expressing orders as a percentage of income rather than as a fixed sum. Using data collected from 21 counties in Wisconsin, we find that payments on behalf of percentage-expressed...