The Impact of Child Support Enforcement on Nonmarital and Marital Births: Does It Differ by Racial and Age Groups?

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  • 1 January 2001
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      • Published in RePEc
Abstract
Using the 1979 through 1998 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Women (NLSY), this paper provides evidence that women who lived in states with effective child support enforcement, measured by both strict child support legislation and high child support expenditure, were more likely to have marital births and less likely to have nonmarital births. The findings suggest that the deterrence effect of child support enforcement on men dominates the opposite effect on women. In addition, the impact of child support enforcement differed by racial and age groups. For black women, effective child support enforcement had a strong effect of decreasing nonmarital births, but not of increasing marital births. The impact, however, went the opposite way for white and/or post-teenage women.
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