Child Support and Partnership Dissolution: Evidence from the UK

Ian Walker () and Yu Zhu

Studies in Economics from School of Economics, University of Kent

Abstract: This paper studies the determinants of partnership dissolution and focuses on the role of child support. We exploit the variation in child support liabilities driven by an important UK policy reform to separately identify the effects of children from the effect of child support liability. We find strong evidence that an increase in the child support liability significantly reduces dissolution risk. Our results suggest that child support criteria that are based on the non-custodial parent's income, compared to criteria based on aggregate incomes of both parents, would imply much smaller separation rates.

Keywords: partnership dissolution; child support; empty nest effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 D31 J12 J13 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-08
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.kent.ac.uk/economics/repec/0408.pdf (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:ukc:ukcedp:0408

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Studies in Economics from School of Economics, University of Kent School of Economics, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7FS.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dr Anirban Mitra ().