Separation, Child Support and Well-Being in Uruguay

Marisa Bucheli and Andrea Vigorito

No 317, Documentos de Trabajo (working papers) from Department of Economics - dECON

Abstract: There is scarce quantitative evidence on the well-being effects of separation and the specific role of child support payments in Latin American countries, due to the paucity of longitudinal data. This article contributes to fill this gap by analyzing the impact of family breakdown and child support in Uruguay on a wide set of household and child outcomes, based on two waves of a longitudinal study (Estudio Longitudinal del Bienestar en Uruguay), that follows-up children that were first graders at public primary schools in 2004. We restrict our study to households composed by cohabiting couples in the baseline (2004). The effect is estimated using a combined difference in difference- PSM method. Our main findings that show that separation entails a significant per capita household income loss (12%) and increases deprivation in terms of income poverty and access to durable goods, for custodial mothers. However, the income fall is partially mitigated by paternal child support payments, public transfers, changes in living arrangements and behavioral responses among mothers, whose labor earnings increase significantly after separation. Meanwhile, separation seems to worsen child educational outcomes, particularly grade repetition. However, this disadvantage vanishes for those children receiving transfers from non co-resident parents.

Keywords: divorce; child support; Uruguay; panel data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I30 J12 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2017-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hap and nep-lam
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12008/19964 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ude:wpaper:0317

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documentos de Trabajo (working papers) from Department of Economics - dECON Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Andrea Doneschi () and ().