Vol. 3, No. 10 (October, 1993) pp. 109-110
SMALL CHANGE: THE ECONOMICS OF CHILD SUPPORT by Andrea H. Beller
and John W. Graham, Yale University Press, 1993
Reviewed by: Jessica Pearson
, Center for Policy Research, Denver,
Colorado
In their book, SMALL CHANGE: THE ECONOMICS OF CHILD SUPPORT,
Andrea Beller and John Graham examine aggregate trends in child
support over the period 1978-1986. Their analyses rely on data
gleaned in the child support supplement to the Current Population
Survey, first administered in 1979 and conducted biennially
thereafter. The combined data set they manipulate contains
information about 16,000 mothers eligible for child support
including 4,000 black and 3,000 never married mothers. This
allows the authors to compare child support experience for blacks
and non-blacks, married and never-married parents. Their analyses
occur within a framework of economic modelling that emphasizes
the benefits and costs of child support for mothers and the
fathers' ability and willingness to pay in explaining child
support outcomes.
Beller and Graham reach a number of conclusions about the child
support system and how it has evolved during a time period of
increasing federal involvement. Their findings underscore the
inadequacy of the system for black and never married women, sub-
groups that have grown disproportionately in the last few
decades. On virtually every indicator of child support outcome,
these women fare dramatically worse than their non-black and
ever-married counterparts. Granted, AFDC recipients, many of whom
are black and/or never married, have received disproportionate
enforcement attention by child support agencies and these
populations have consequently experienced certain increases in
award and collection rates. Nevertheless, their overall standing
with respect to awards, order levels and receipts lag far behind.
Although the authors do not focus on the policy implications of
this finding, it does raise serious questions about the whole
premise of private transfer as a remedy for those with
out-of-wedlock births and minority poverty.
Among non-black and ever-married women, the authors find evidence
of only small increases in award and receipt rates, suggesting
that efforts to strengthen child support enforcement may have
been partially successful. Although they find no evidence that
government spending for child support has increased child support
receipts, they find some evidence that certain enforcement
techniques have been helpful including criminal penalties and
wage withholding. Administrative procedures, on the other hand,
appear to be associated with lower receipt rates. It should be
noted that these data were collected prior to the implementation
of many new aggressive enforcement remedies.
In any event, evidence of modest increases in award and receipt
rates were more than offset by a 25 percent decline in the real
dollar amount of child support payments made during 1978-1986.
The authors attribute this to the failure of child support order
levels to keep up with inflation and changes in the real incomes
of fathers, although they note that real incomes of fathers
stagnated after 1973. The obvious remedy to this problem is the
utilization of child support guidelines to establish order levels
that reflect parental income. This too became mandatory in 1988
pursuant to the enactment of the Family Support Act, along with
requirements for periodic review and updating of old awards at
the request of either party. Again, given the time frame of their
study, Beller and Graham offer no reading on the impact of these
and other provisions of the Child Support Enforcement Amendments
of 1984 and the 1988 Family Support Act.
My biggest frustration with this book is that it feels out of
date. The last year for which data was utilized in this study was
1986. Since then, legislation has been enacted requiring states
to improve paternity establishment or face financial penalties,
utilize presumptive child support guidelines, institute periodic
updating of child support awards and routinely use income
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withholding and other enforcement remedies. The architects of
child support guidelines and other remedies embodied in recent
legislation have predicted dramatic impacts on child support
award and payment patterns. The research that my colleagues and I
have conducted comparing awards promulgated prior to and
following the adoption of presumptive guidelines in specific
jurisdictions suggests that these impacts have been extremely
modest. Has the new legislation translated into substantial
gains? Which sub-groups, if any, have benefitted? Why and why
not? To my mind, these are the vital questions that need to be
addressed. Unfortunately, this book does not do the job.
Another frustration I have with this book is the nature of the
CPS data they utilized to operationalize the variables in their
model. Father's ability to pay was measured by the socioeconomic
characteristics of mothers and was supplemented by mean income
data of year-round, full-time male workers by race. In a similar
vein, information about the mother was used to represent father's
desire to pay child support. Even mother's expected benefits and
costs were indirectly measured through the limited available data
on her marital status, education level and numbers and ages of
her children. There were absolutely no direct measures of many of
the determinants of child support outcomes including father's
income, father's employment status and stability, father's
remarriage, current living arrangements for mothers and fathers,
custody and visitation arrangements and the relationship between
the parents.
The authors concede these limitations but indicate that they
aren't so critical given their interest in revealing racial and
marital status differentials and trends over time. Critical or
not, the result is a limited book that documents what is obvious
to anyone who has worked with the child support system: that it
is bad for everyone but worse for blacks and never-marrieds.