Research shows that stronger child support enforcement increases the amount of formal support received by children from their nonresident fathers. Yet, little is known about: 1) the informal cash and non-cash contributions that nonresident fathers make—especially to nonmarital children, 2) the...

High rates of incarceration among American men, coupled with high rates of fatherhood among men in prison, have motivated recent research on the effects of parental imprisonment on children’s development. We contribute to this literature using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing...

We investigate the influence of changes in demography, the strength of the economy, and social policies on teen birth rates in the U.S. from 1981 to 1999, a period of wildly fluctuating rates. We find that demographic and social policy changes largely counteracted one another during this period...

Research shows that stronger child support enforcement increases the amount of formal support received by children from their nonresident fathers. Yet, little is known about: 1) the informal cash and non-cash contributions that nonresident fathers make—especially to nonmarital children, 2) 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...

Nearly a third of all births in the United States today occur to parents who are not legally married. The proportions are even higher among poor and minority populations, 40% among Hispanics, and 70% among blacks (Ventura et al. 1995). Out-of-wedlock childbearing is occurring with increasing...

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...

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...

Our paper utilizes variation across the fifty U.S. states to examine the relationship between public expenditures on children and child outcomes. We find that public expenditures on children are related to better child outcomes across a wide range of indicators including measures of child...

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...