Child Support and Fathers' Remarriage and Fertility

David Bloom, Cecilia Conrad and Cynthia Miller

No 5781, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper tests the hypothesis that child support obligations impede remarriage among nonresident fathers. Hazard models fit to data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and from the Survey of Income and Program Participation reveal that child support obligations deter remarriage among low-income nonresident fathers. The benefits to children of stricter child support enforcement are thus diminished by the negative effects of child support on remarriage, as a substantial share of nonresident fathers remarry and help support women with children. Indeed, simple calculations based on our findings suggest that the financial benefits to children in single-parent families of improved enforcement may be substantially or completely offset by the negative effects of enforcement that operate indirectly through diminished remarriage. The results provide no evidence that child support influences the nature of matches in the remarriage market or the likelihood of subsequent fertility.

JEL-codes: J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1996-10
Note: AG EH LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Published as Garfinkel, I., S. McLanahan, D. Meyer, and J. Seltor (eds.) The Effects of Child Support Enforcement on Non-Resident Fathers. New York: Russell Sage, 1998.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w5781.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:nbr:nberwo:5781

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w5781

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().