To study changes in nonresident father contact since the 1970s, we pooled data from 4 national surveys: the National Survey of Children (1976), the National Survey of Families and Households (1987 - 1988), the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1996), and the National Survey of America's Families (2002). On the basis of mothers' reports,…

Strong child support enforcement requires fathers to take financial responsibility for their children and may also encourage more responsible sexual behavior. Using the 1997-2001 waves of the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (N = 4,272), this article examines the association between child support enforcement and the sexual activity of…

Policies governing divorce and parenting, such as child support orders and enforcement, child custody regulations, and marital dissolution requirements, can have a large impact on the welfare of parents and children. Recent research has produced evidence on the responses of divorce rates to unilateral divorce laws and child support enforcement. In…

Much of the literature on welfare dynamics has focused on the effects of recipient characteristics and state-level characteristics such as welfare benefits and economic conditions; there has been very little analysis on the effects of child support. This paper, using the 1979-1996 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, examines whether child…