The interaction of welfare and child support regulations has created a situation in which child support policy's incentives that discourage unwed fatherhood tend to be stronger than its incentives that encourage unwed motherhood. This suggests that more stringent child support enforcement...

Some scholars have suggested that a negative consequence of strengthening child support enforcement is to encourage fathers to shift from regular sector to underground employment. We employ data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to investigate the relationship between the...

Despite interest in the potential of the welfare system as a tool to affect marriage behaviors among low-income women, little is known about how welfare participation affects decisions to marry. We employ an event history approach to examine transitions to marriage over a five-year period among...

Incarceration is widespread in the United States, and previous literature has shown significant negative effects of incarceration on later employment, earnings, and relationship stability. Given the high rates of fatherhood among men in jails and prisons, a large number of children are placed at...

Child support enforcement policies enjoy widespread support from legislators because most people believe that fathers should support their children, even when they live in separate households. Less often emphasized is the potentially far-reaching impact of these policies on increasing the...

Some advocates worry that stronger child support enforcement may increase domestic violence. The predictions of a simple economic model are ambiguous; stronger enforcement may increase the mother’s bargaining power, which reduces violence, but may also increase the father’s opportunity and...

We examine the effects of incarceration on the earnings and employment in a sample of poor fathers, using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. The Fragile Families data offer a rich set of covariates for adjusting for factors that are correlated with both incarceration and...

Children living in single-parent families, particularly those born to unmarried parents, are at high risk for experiencing material hardship. Previous research based on cross sectional data suggests that father involvement, especially visitation, diminishes hardship. In this paper, we use...

This paper examines the effects of stronger child support enforcement and declines in welfare benefits on changes in non-marital childbearing between 1980 and 1996. Economic theory suggests that stricter child support enforcement will increase the costs of children for unwed fathers, making them...