This article examines alternative approaches to encourage family formation among fragile families, including higher cash benefits, more liberal acceptance of welfare applications, more effective child support enforcement, and efforts to increase education and employment of low-income parents. We...

Buoyed by the success of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), whose time limits and work requirements played a large role in the reduction of the welfare rolls, conservative advocates of welfare reform are now moving to ensure that our welfare...

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...

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....

Buoyed by the success of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), whose time limits and work requirements played a large role in the reduction of the welfare rolls, conservative advocates of welfare reform are now moving to ensure that our welfare...

This paper sheds light on the determinants of choice between four co- parenting arrangements: father absence, father’s non-residential visitations, cohabitation, and marriage. In our theoretical framework, we use an adaptation of Becker’s Demand & Supply (D&S) model of marriage and a...

This article examines alternative approaches to encourage family formation among fragile families, including higher cash benefits, more liberal acceptance of welfare applications, more effective child support enforcement, and efforts to increase education and employment of low-income parents. We...

We are given a bipartite graph G = (A B;E) where each vertex has a preference list ranking its neighbors: in particular, every a A ranks its neighbors in a strict order of preference, whereas the preference list of any b B may contain ties. A matching M is popular if there is no matching M' such...

Most of the public discussion and academic analyses of nonmarital birthrates focus on women's fertility intentions and welfare. In contrast, we argue that stricter child support enforcement may lower nonmarital birthrates by raising the costs of fatherhood for men. The analysis is based on...