Untying the Knot: How Child Support and Alimony Affect Couples’ Dynamic Decisions and Welfare
构建动态模型研究子女抚养费和配偶赡养费如何影响夫妻的劳动供给、家庭生产、储蓄和离婚决策，利用丹麦数据估计模型，发现配偶赡养费比子女抚养费更抑制劳动供给且保险效率更低，最优政策是增加子女抚养费、减少配偶赡养费。
Abstract In many countries, divorce law mandates post-marital maintenance payments (child support and alimony) to insure the lower earner in married couples against financial losses upon divorce. This paper studies how maintenance payments affect couples’ intertemporal decisions and welfare. I develop a dynamic model of family labour supply, home production, savings, and divorce and estimate it using Danish register and survey data. The model captures the policy tradeoff between providing insurance to the lower earner and enabling couples to specialise efficiently, on the one hand, and maintaining labour supply incentives for divorcees, on the other hand. I use the estimated model to study various counterfactual policy scenarios. I find that alimony comes with more substantial labour supply disincentives compared to child support payments and is less efficient in providing consumption insurance. The welfare maximising policy, within the status quo policy space, involves increasing child support and reducing alimony payments. My results show that Pareto improvements beyond this welfare maximising policy are feasible, highlighting limitations of how child support and alimony policies are commonly implemented.