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Title: Child Support Guidelines and Divorce Rates
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Brinig, Margaret F. Allen, Douglas W. |
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Child Support Guidelines and Divorce Rates Notre Dame Legal Studies Research Paper No: 10-19, Notre Dame Law School, June 2010. Also: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1638133 Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: Notre Dame Law School Keyword(s): Child Support; Divorce; Marital Status; Modeling; State-Level Data/Policy Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. A child support guideline is a formula used to calculate support payments based on a few family characteristics. Guidelines began replacing court awarded support payments in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and were later mandated by the federal government in 1988. Two fundamentally different types of guidelines are used: percentage of obligor income, and income shares models. This paper explores the incentives to divorce under the two schemes, and uses the NLSY data set to test the key predictions. We find that percentage of obligor income models are destabilizing for families with high incomes. This may explain why several states have converted from obligor to income share models, and it provides a subtle lesson to the no-fault divorce debate. |
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Bibliography Citation
Brinig, Margaret F. and Douglas W. Allen. "Child Support Guidelines and Divorce Rates." Notre Dame Legal Studies Research Paper No: 10-19, Notre Dame Law School, June 2010. |