Child Support Payments: Evidence from Repeated Cross Sections
利用1985年数据，分析子女抚养费对单亲母亲家庭贫困率的影响，发现获得抚养费的家庭贫困率显著降低，并讨论加强抚养费执行对减贫和减少福利依赖的作用。
Single-parent female-headed families are a large and growing proportion of all families and comprise a disproportionately large share of the poverty population. However, among these father-absent families, those who receive child support payments have higher incomes and lower poverty rates. Unfortunately, many eligible women have no child support awards and many with awards do not receive full payment. With low earnings in the labor market and difficulty finding inexpensive quality child care, many mothers have no choice but to rely on the welfare system. The incidence of poverty is far greater among single-parent families headed by women than among other types of families. Of the 8.8 million women with children present and father absent in 1985, 2.8 million had incomes below the poverty level.' The absence of child support is a significant contributory factor. The poverty rate in 1985 for women not having child support awards was 49 percent; for those who did, it was 21 percent. Among those women awarded child support, the poverty rate was 18 percent if they received payments and 27 percent if no payments were received. As these figures suggest, securing more child support from absent fathers should help to alleviate poverty among single-parent families and may help to reduce the welfare rolls. Recent interest in improving the nation's child support enforcement system was sparked by the 1980 Census Bureau's release of alarming statistics on nonpayment rates. These statistics showed that, in 1979, only 59 percent of mothers with children from absent fathers had child support awards. Among those with an award and due payment in 1978, only about half received full paymentapproximately one-quarter received partial payment, while one-quarter received no payment at all. Moreover, payments that were made were often irregular. The average amount of child support (conditional upon receiving support) was only $1800 for an average of nearly two children. The situation was considerably worse than average for black mothers and never-married mothers. Only about one-third of black mothers had child support awards and among those that did, the award amount was about 18 percent lower than for nonblacks (see our 1986 article). Only 11 percent of never-married mothers had awards. Award amounts were less than half as much as for divorced mothers.