Daniel R. Meyer

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• PhD
• Professor Emeritus at University of Wisconsin–Madison

Objective This study investigates the role of child support in family economic well-being and how it has shifted over recent decades, considering differences by family characteristics. Background The formal child support program has wide reach and has historically been an important source of income for some. Recent critiques indicate the potential...

Understanding patterns of children’s living arrangements (physical custody) in separated families and the factors related to joint physical custody are crucial as custody patterns have significant implications for the well-being of children and parents. In this study we use the 2021 European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions Survey (...

Objective and Background Previous research shows the benefits of formal child support to children during their childhood; however, the long‐term effect of child support receipt on outcomes as adults has not been studied. This inquiry examines whether adults who received formal child support as children have different labor market outcomes than thos...

Objective We examine the relationship between shared placement and parenting stress for low‐income fathers. Background Shared placement (joint physical custody), a living arrangement in which children whose parents live apart spend a significant amount of time living with each, has increased among families in the United States. Little is known abo...

Determining whether a household is ‘in poverty,’ requires identifying a resource unit, typically consisting of individuals who both co-reside and pool resources. High levels of family complexity and fluidity in living arrangements among contemporary American families, particularly those that include children, have complicated this task. We leverage...

Increasingly, children live in both parents' homes equally after parental separation, but little is known about whether social security policy supports these shared‐residence families. We propose that a determination of support for shared residence in various policies can be based on two criteria: whether both parents can receive benefits and wheth...

In this research note, we demonstrate that trends in the likelihood of child support agreements differ by marital history (i.e., never-married vs. ever-married) and by whether measures rely on the stock of families (i.e., all those in which children live apart from a parent) or the flow (i.e., those that include children who newly live apart from a...

Research on fathering has substantially increased but we still know relatively little about whether and how fathers’ own perspectives on their parenting differ across a variety of family situations. We estimate associations between nonresident fathers’ family types and nonresident fathers’ perceptions of the quality of their parenting and their rel...

Research on fathering has substantially increased but we still know relatively little about whether and how fathers’ own perspectives on their parenting differ across a variety of family situations. We estimate associations between nonresident fathers’ family types and nonresident fathers’ perceptions of the quality of their parenting and their rel...

Little is known about government policies that regulate economic transfers between separated parents (child support) outside of high-income countries. This paper provides the first broad overview of child support policy and its outcomes in 37 middle- and low-income countries. Using a systematic literature review, we provide information on child sup...

Research on child support compliance has focused on the characteristics of noncustodial parents (NCPs) that are associated with compliance, finding that compliance with child support orders is primarily related to the ability to pay support as demonstrated by earnings. Yet, there is evidence linking social support networks to both earnings and nonc...

Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and the USA instituted child support agencies in the late 1900s and had some policies that resulted in having lowered governmental expenditures when child support was paid. Building on previous research comparing these four countries, this article examines the extent to which these countries currently use explicit co...

We provide an overview of child support policy in high-income countries, highlighting differences in institutional arrangements, the amount of child support due, and the amount of child support received. We show that the United States expects high levels of child support from nonresident parents when compared to other countries, that noncompliance...

The amount of accumulated unpaid child support (arrears) owed throughout the United States is over $100 billion. High arrears balances mean that those who owe support may face punitive enforcement actions, those due child support did not receive the money they were owed, and the child support program must devote more attention to enforcing payment...

Families (and sometimes courts) make important decisions regarding child physical custody arrangements post-separation, and shared parenting arrangements are increasingly common in most developed countries. Shared arrangements may be differentially associated with parental satisfaction, and these associations may vary across countries. Using data f...

Background: While a striking rise in shared physical custody after divorce has been observed in Wisconsin and some European countries, the same trend in shared custody has not been documented in US national data. Objective: We provide new evidence on the time trend in shared physical custody after divorce in the United States. Methods: We use eight...

Most children in the United States will spend at least part of their childhood living apart from one of their parents; the child support system is designed to ensure that they nonetheless receive financial support. While the system is largely effective when noncustodial parents have substantial regular earnings, many noncustodial parents, including...

Increasingly, parents in separated families expect to equally share care of their children post-separation. In this article we extend a well-known family policy model to generate hypotheses about the level of child support to be paid by separated parents when children live primarily with their mother (‘sole custody’) in contrast to when children sp...

Shared care, in which children of separated parents spend roughly equal amounts of time with each parent, has been increasing in many countries. Little is known about the child support policy responses to this arrangement in various countries.

Many noncustodial parents do not pay the support they owe. The child support enforcement program has a number of tools to facilitate child support collections in response to nonpayment, such as suspending licenses and holding court hearings. Despite policy interest in raising levels of compliance with child support orders, little recent research ex...

The public social safety net in the U.S. for single mothers and their children, including cash assistance and in-kind benefits or vouchers, is largely tied to work—both from individual earnings and from child support intended to supplement public support. How does the safety net perform in periods of severe work instability, such as during the unem...

The increased frequency of divorce, separation, and nonmarital childbearing over the past several decades has contributed to the rise of parents not living with their children in the same household. These nonresident parents are typically fathers who share the economic responsibility for their children across households by paying child support. Thi...

Background/purpose: Child support (money from one parent to the other to support children following relationship dissolution) is a contentious policy in many countries. Many non-resident parents feel they are being ordered to pay unreasonably high amounts, while many resident parents feel that payments are unreasonably low. These tensions may be be...

Child support may merely reshuffle poverty, reducing child poverty among families who receive it at the expense of the economic well-being of children living with a nonresident parent. Our study examines child support's effects on child poverty, considering those who pay child support and those who receive child support, and doing so in Colombia an...

Child support contributes to many custodial-mother families’ income, yet there are persistent concerns that many noncustodial fathers have low-wage, unstable jobs that limit their ability to pay child support. Thus, child support may exacerbate inequality—that is, it may transfer resources from a low-income noncustodial father to a custodial-mother...

Understanding the correlates of nonresident fathers' involvement, particularly the association between involvement and fathers' economic status is important for improving child well-being. However, previous research has produced mixed results. Using data from the longitudinal Survey of Wisconsin Works Families (N = 828), and administrative records...

We argue that child support, the central program specifically targeting single-parent families, should increase financial resources for children living with a single parent, with a secondary goal of holding parents responsible for supporting their children. Current child support policy is substantially successful for divorcing families in which the...

We document the dramatic decline in the United States of mother sole custody arrangements following divorce. Our empirical analysis uses Wisconsin court records data spanning more than two decades (1988–2010). Updating earlier analyses that showed significant increases in shared custody, we estimate that shared custody (where children spend at leas...

In times of austerity, governments concerned about the economic vulnerability of lone-parent families may look to non-resident parents to provide more income through child support payments. Emerging research has examined the way child support schemes and welfare benefits interact, revealing that child support’s poverty-reducing effects can be limit...

Nonmarital children account for two fifths of births in the US, and close to two thirds of these children do not live with their fathers by age five. Although nonmarital children primarily live with their mothers, joint legal custody has emerged as an option for their parents. Parents with joint legal custody are expected to make major decisions fo...

We examine families with children and the potential impact of changes in family structure on changes in income poverty between 2003 and 2012 in Colombia and Peru. Results show that although the types of families that are increasing—single-mother and cohabitingcouple families—are the ones most at risk economically, overall poverty did not increase....

In most developed countries, children in lone parent families face a high risk of poverty. A partial solution commonly sought in English-speaking nations is to increase the amounts of private child maintenance paid by the other parent. However, where lone parent families are in receipt of social assistance benefits, some countries hold back a porti...

We consider the intersection between two striking U.S. trends: dramatic increases in the imprisonment of fathers and increases in the proportion of mothers who have children with more than one partner (multiple-partner fertility, or MPF). Using matched longitudinal administrative data that provide unusually comprehensive and accurate information ab...

Childrens living arrangements have become increasingly complex over the last decades, with more children born to parents who do not live together and, even among those born to parents who do live together, increasing numbers are experiencing their parents separating and one or both re-partnering. These changes raise questions about who has financia...

Despite substantial policy attention to increasing the number of custodial parents with child support orders, the proportion reporting that they are owed child support is falling. Potential explanations for this include increases in shared custody, increases in the number of noncustodial parents who have low incomes (or incomes lower than the custo...

Despite efforts to strengthen child support enforcement over the past decades, the level of unpaid child support remains high. High child support arrears create problems for families and states; however, our understanding of how arrears accumulate is limited. Using longitudinal data from Wisconsin administrative records for noncustodial fathers, th...

Using cross-sectional data from the National Household Surveys (2004-2012), this study presents the trend in child support receipt in Peru over this period and factors associated with child support receipt. In both descriptive and multivariate logit analyses, the likelihood of receiving support among single mothers increased substantially. Some fac...

When a parent has another child with a new partner, a significant effect on parents and children is likely, making factors associated with multiple-partner fertility of interest to policy makers. For single mothers, one potential policy-relevant factor influencing their subsequent fertility with a new partner is child support income. However, the d...

We examine whether low-income mothers receive child care from their children's nonresident fathers or nonresident fathers' relatives, particularly asking whether mothers who have children with more than one nonresident father are more or less likely to receive child care. Using data from the Survey of Wisconsin Works Families, we find that about 44...

This article reexamines the living arrangements of children following their parents' divorce, using Wisconsin Court Records, updating an analysis that showed relatively small but significant increases in shared custody in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These changes have accelerated markedly in the intervening years: between 1988 and 2008, the pro...

We examine the effects of an increase in income on the cohabitation and marriage of single mothers. Using data from an experiment that resulted in randomly assigned differences in child support receipt for welfare-receiving single mothers, we find that exogenous income increases (as a result of receiving all child support that was paid) are associa...

This article examines the extent to which child support is helping custodial-mother families move out of poverty or move closer to the poverty line in Colombia. Data come from the 2008 Quality of Life Survey, which provides information for 3,359 custodial-mother families. We calculate poverty rates and poverty gaps using both pre-child-support and...

Background/Purpose:This research brings together two striking trends: dramatic increases in the incarceration of fathers and steady increases in the proportion of mothers who have children with more than one partner (multiple-partner fertility, or MPF). Fathers’ imprisonment may increase mothers’ MPF because imprisonment immediately enforces couple...

This article describes US child maintenance policy, providing an overview of the scheme in place and how it is working. US child maintenance policy is difficult to describe. On some issues, there is a unified national policy, whereas for others there are separate schemes in each state. For example, in nearly every state, child maintenance obligatio...

Due to the high incidence of poverty among custodial-parent families, most countries have a variety of policies designed to increase these families' income security, including child support. However, despite policy efforts, in a wide range of countries the majority of custodial-parent families do not receive these transfers. Does this suggest that...

Research suggests that paternal re-partnering and new-partner fertility are associated with decreased nonresident father investments in children. Few studies, however, have examined the influence of maternal re-partnering and new-partner births on nonresident father investments. We use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to examine...

The authors examined whether nonresident fathers provide informal support to their children and whether support stops if their expartner goes on to have a child with a new man. A logistic regression analysis of longitudinal survey and administrative data for 434 women who received welfare in Wisconsin showed that fathers are less likely to provide...

Background and Purpose: Child support enforcement is a central element of public polices to improve the economic wellbeing of single-parent families. Children in these families are at elevated risk of living in poverty. They are also at elevated risk of living in complex families in which one or both of their biological parents have had children wi...

When parents have children from multiple partners, the resulting complex families challenge conventions concerning parents’ rights and responsibilities. These challenges are particularly salient for child support policies, which articulate parents’ obligations to their children and determine the amount of support due. Data from Wisconsin suggest th...

Family complexity creates difficulties for child support policy. We examine whether policy in 14 countries results in nonresident parents having equal financial obligations to children in different complex family situations. We find that when a nonresident parent owes support to two nonresident children in different families, the most common policy...

The declining availability of public assistance and increasing reliance on child support as a key income source for single-parent families raise questions about the adequacy and consistency of support. Using detailed Wisconsin administrative records for custodial mothers who obtained a new child support order in 2000, this study examines the regula...

We document the incidence and evolution of family complexity from the perspective of children. Following a cohort of firstborn children whose mothers were not married at the time of their birth, we consider family structure changes over the first 10 years of the child's life-considering both full and half-siblings who are coresidential or who live...

Early welfare reform research showed high rates of employment for TANF leavers. However, work-focused welfare may not be effective during an economic downturn. We investigate the employment of Wisconsin TANF leavers, contrasting outcomes among early leavers (1998) with those who left during the 2001 recession. We use data from administrative record...

Over time, public policy changes have strengthened the private child support system while reducing access to public support—welfare. Given the especially limited availability of public support, nonresident fathers’ economic contributions through child support can play an important role in helping children to avoid poverty. In this article, the auth...

The underlying theory behind child support guidelines implies that child support orders should change when the incomes of noncustodial parents change. This paper documents changes in noncustodial fathers' earnings over a five-year period and examines the relationship between the changes in earnings and modifications in child support orders. Using d...

Using a recent cohort of single mothers who received child care subsidies, this study explores the extent to which low-income families utilize subsidies, factors associated with subsidy exit, and whether these factors have differential influences on the various types of exit from the subsidy program (i.e., exit with high earnings, low earnings, or...

Background: Many noncustodial parents provide informal and formal child support to their children, but informal arrangements may break down over time, especially as parents have new relationships. Little is known about trends in informal support, nor how informal support changes when parents have children with new partners. We hypothesize that info...

Background/Purpose: An influential 1993 study by Phillips and Garfinkel (published in Demography, volume 30) found that the incomes of nonresident fathers in Wisconsin increased in the seven years following divorce or nonmarital birth. Based on these results, some argued that even if nonresident fathers did not initially have much ability to pay ch...

A large percentage of poor children live with just one parent, usually their mother, and single-parent families are more vulnerable to economic downturns than are two-parent families. Living arrangements also affect the optimal design of policies related to income support and child support. In this paper we briefly review changes in family structur...

The official definition used in calculating U.S. poverty rates answers these questions by including total pre-tax money income (ignoring near- and noncash sources, assets, and all expenditures) for all individuals related by blood or marriage (a family) and comparing this to a threshold that varies by the family's size and age composition but not t...

This study identified the employment and earnings trajectories of welfare recipients over six years for a sample of 14,150 women who entered the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF) in Wisconsin in its first year. Wisconsin longitudinal administrative data were used to examine differential patterns of mid-term (three years) and lo...

In most states, child support paid on behalf of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) participants is used to offset TANF and child support administrative expenditures; this policy primarily benefits taxpayers. In contrast, Wisconsin allowed most custodial parents to keep all support paid on their behalf. This policy, which treats wel...

This article examines the relationships among child support orders, child support payments, and the compliance rate (payments compared to orders). It uses administrative data from Wisconsin, examining 3 years of orders and payments by fathers who had their first order for child support to a particular mother in 2000. Using fixed-effects models that...

There is little research on knowledge of the policy rules that could affect individuals, either in general or in evaluations of new programs. The lack of research is surprising, given that knowledge gaps could limit the effectiveness of reforms or lead to incorrect inferences regarding the effects of a policy change. In this article, we use survey...

This article discusses whether child support payments (from all types of agreements, not just Child Support Agency assessments) are actually helping lone-mother families or whether most low-income mothers are connected to men who have little capacity to pay, so that child support actually helps only moderate-income families? This article uses data...

Under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, families are subject to greater work requirements, and the severity of sanction for noncompliance has increased. Using Wisconsin longitudinal administrative data, the authors performed event history analysis to examine the dynamic patterns of sanctioning and the patterns of benefits following a sanctio...

Family complexity that results when adults have children with multiple partners (multiple-partner fertility) is quite common. It also has important implications for understanding child support outcomes and for designing and evaluating welfare and family policy. Using a unique set of merged administrative data, this article provides the first compre...

Welfare programs changed dramatically in 1996. Caseloads dropped by more than 9 million recipients over an eight-year period, and millions entered the labor market in the wake of these changes. Since the start of the "welfare revolution," research has emerged to document the new ways former welfare recipients are using federal entitlement programs...

As the proportion of children living with both parents has fallen and as public support for sole-parent families has been reduced, child support has become a crucial source of income for single-parent families.1 In this chapter, we describe the logic and outcomes of the child support system and consider the relationship between economic conditions,...

While most mothers with child-support orders receive support, the amount they receive varies substantially, the researchers find upon examining the situations of 14,729 Wisconsin mothers with new child support orders in 2000. Drawing on data from 2001-2003, this study finds that variation in child-support income varies year to year and within a yea...

Current debates about the success of TANF reforms have been obscured by the use of inconsistent indicators of success, as well as by measurement difficulties associated with alternative indicators. This paper considers conceptual and measurement issues associated with three different indicators of economic well-being: independence from public assis...

Although a number of current policy initiatives presume that nonresident fathers could provide substantially more income for their (welfare-attached) children, several factors lead to skepticism. This article uses administrative and survey data to describe the characteristics of fathers of welfare recipients. The results suggest that most of these...

The precipitous decline in cash welfare caseloads since the late 1990s has heightened concern about the adequacy of alternative income sources for former recipients, who continue to experience high levels of poverty. In a project that constructed comparable estimates of economic well- being for welfare participants in New Jersey, Washing- ton, and...

This article documents patterns and correlates of child support compliance among fathers of welfare recipients in Wisconsin. We introduce the concept of discretionary obligors ( because payment results in part from voluntary cooperation) and nondiscretionary obligors ( because payment results from routine enforcement mechanisms) to differentiate be...

Blakeslee, and John Wolf for assistance with the manuscript and colleagues at IRP for helpful comments. Any views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the sponsoring institutions. Child Support Orders and Payments: Do Lower Orders Result in Higher Payments? In 1984, each state was required to establish a mat...

We use administrative data from Wisconsin to compare employment, earnings, and income outcomes for welfare leavers under early reforms and under the later, more stringent Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. We find substantially higher rates of exit in the later period. Later leavers are somewhat more likely to work, but their earnings...

Current welfare reforms attempt to move low-income women with children from reliance on welfare to work. The logic of some current efforts relies on the thesis that employment, even in low-paying jobs, leads eventually to self-sufficiency. With data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the authors analyzed the relationship between work h...

Abstract Welfare caseloads have fallen sharply since the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), raising questions about the post-welfare experiences of welfare leavers, including whether leavers are participating in Food Stamps and Medicaid when they are eligible for these supports. This pap...

The rapid reduction in Aid to Families with Dependent Children caseloads during its last two years, and the continued decline of participation following its replacement by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, raise the question of how families who no longer receive cash assistance are faring. What are their economic circumstances? Are they bett...