Three Studies on Family Well-being and Child Support

Download or read book Three Studies on Family Well-being and Child Support written by and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines the effects of child support on the wellbeing of custodial-mother families. In the first study I examine whether child support affects the labor supply of custodial mothers participating in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. I use data from the Wisconsin Child Support Demonstration Evaluation (CSDE). Unlike previous nonexperimental research, I do not find any negative effect of child support on the likelihood of working for pay and hours worked of custodial mothers. Recent U.S. social welfare policies have focused on increasing both custodial mothers' child support collections and their labor supply. The results suggest that these may be compatible policies; the absence of a negative labor supply effect strengthens the potential antipoverty effectiveness of child support. In the second and third studies I focus on the associations of child support with outcomes that are likely to affect the economic wellbeing of children in custodial-mother families as adults. In the second study I use the Colombian Quality of Life Survey to study the role of child support on food insecurity. Multivariate analyses show that families receiving child support are less likely to experience inadequate consumption of food. This association is particularly concentrated among single-mother families and families headed by younger mothers. Overall, these results suggest that policies that increase child support receipt in less-developed countries like Colombia are likely to decrease food insecurity among custodial-mother families. In the third study I use the Colombian Longitudinal Survey of Wealth, Income, Labor and Land (ELCA) to examine the association of child support with child chronic malnutrition. I use different approaches in order to minimize bias for unobserved heterogeneity between children who receive and do not receive child support, including probit regressions with extensive controls and propensity score matching techniques. Results suggest that child support is negatively associated with chronic malnutrition among young children in urban Colombia. Children who benefit from this transfer are between 8 and 10 percentage points less likely to experience chronic malnutrition.