The economic impact of child support enforcement on payment and receipt, remarriage, and female labor supply

Over the past thirty years, divorces, separations, and nonmarital births have risen leading to a proliferation of female-headed households. Because of the growth in female-headed households, increasing public attention has focused on the creation and enforcement of private child support. This dissertation explores economic responses to child support and child support enforcement using state variation in the timing of child support law enactment and concludes that child support enforcement in aggregate has had a positive impact on children's well being through increasing household income both directly and indirectly.;Cumulatively we find that child support laws work to increase the probability of child support receipt, consistent with the goal of their implementation. While I find some support that individual laws have been successful at improving child support receipt, the support has been fairly weak, particularly once state fixed effects are introduced. Further, even when statistical significance has been found, the magnitude of the effect has been fairly small. Thus, analysis has demonstrated that it is not so much individual laws that affect child support receipt as the aggregate legal environment.;Since child support enforcement leads to an exogenous increase in income for the mother, it has the potential to reduce her probability of remarriage in two ways: she may no longer view remarriage as necessary to increase household income or she may view the potential stepfather as less attractive because of his decreased income. Exploring this hypothesis, I have found no evidence to support the claim that increased child support enforcement reduces the probability of remarriage; I have found support for the opposite. Increased child support enforcement leads to a negligible to positive effect on remarriage rates and increases household income both directly and indirectly.;Similarly, increased exogenous income may either increase or decrease women's labor supply. I find evidence that child support/alimony income and child support enforcement laws have a positive impact on single mother's labor force participation and hours decisions, increasing household income, though the impact is not of a very large magnitude. The impact is found to be greatest for those with the least education.