Maria Cancian

• 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Background: Prior research on Child Protective Services (CPS) involvement among at-risk youth focuses on their roles as parents perpetrating maltreatment against biological offspring. Given family complexity and assortative partnering, measuring all CPS involvement - as perpetrators and non-offending parents of victims - provides new insight into...

We analyze the role of newly integrated data from the child support and child welfare systems in seeding a major policy change in Wisconsin. Parents are often ordered to pay child support to offset the costs of their children’s stay in foster care. Policy allows for consideration of the “best interests of the child.” Concerns that charging parents...

Early childbearing is associated with a host of educational and economic disruptions for teenage girls and increased risk of adverse outcomes for their children. Low-income, maltreated, and foster youth have a higher risk of teen motherhood than the general population of youth. In this study, we assessed differences in the risk of early motherhood...

Child support guidelines are one of the most explicit, and consequential, public articulations of parents’ obligations to their biological children. States must weigh a variety of policy tradeoffs, including issues of equity, transparency, and simplicity. Many states are shifting to “income-shares” guidelines models from “percentage-of-income” mode...

Foster children are at disproportionate risk of adverse outcomes throughout the life course. Public policy prioritizes permanency (exiting foster care through reunification with birth parents, adoption, or legal guardianship) to promote foster youths’ healthy development and well-being, but little empirical evidence indicates that permanency, inclu...

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...

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...

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...

Most families in the child protective services system also interact with the child support enforcement system. This study exploits a natural experiment in Wisconsin, created by the state's large regional variation in child support referral policy, to estimate a potentially important effect of child support enforcement on the duration of out-of-home...

The prevalence of incarceration in the United States is increasingly well known. The prevalence of family involvement with child protective services (CPS) is less understood, though, and there is limited research examining links between incarceration and CPS involvement. Here, we describe the incidence and prevalence of incarceration and CPS involv...

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...

Child support is a critical source of income, especially for the growing proportion of children born to unmarried mothers. Current social policy supports custodial parent employment (e.g., the Earned Income Tax Credit [EITC] and other work supports have largely taken the place of an entitlement to cash assistance for single mothers of young childre...

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...

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...

Poor school outcomes for children in out-of-home placement (OHP) raise concerns about the adequacy of child welfare and educational policy for this vulnerable population. We analyzed the relation between OHP and academic achievement, focusing on reading and math achievement in grades 3 through 8. Linked administrative data were used for our analyti...

The declining availability of cash welfare, and an income support system that increasingly provides benefits that complement, rather than replace, paid work, combine to raise concerns about families disconnected from work and welfare. These concerns were further heightened in the recent recession. While past research on disconnected populations has...

This article discusses the consequences of family composition for poverty and income and its implications for policy. Marriage rates are declining, rates of nonmarital births are increasing (both poverty-increasing), while families are smaller, and there are more working mothers (both poverty-decreasing). Marriage remains less likely and nonmarital...

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...

Using longitudinal administrative data for Wisconsin, this article accounts for the length of time on welfare and the length of sanctioning to better understand the effect of work-related financial sanctions on cash welfare (TANF) participants' program exits and subsequent employment. Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) remains an import...

Background and Purpose:With the shift in US welfare policy and declines in cash assistance to the poor, there has been growing interest in understanding paths to and conditions of what is becoming known as the “disconnected,” those who appear to have inadequate income sources but do not receive the available public assistance. This study investigat...

About 6 million children were reported to the child welfare system as being at risk of child abuse or neglect in the United States in 2010. Researchers and policy makers have long recognized that children living in families with limited economic resources are at higher risk for maltreatment than children from higher socioeconomic strata, but the ca...

Substantial declines in employment and earnings among disadvantaged men may be exacerbated by child support enforcement policies that are designed to help support families but may have the unintended consequence of discouraging fathers’ employment. Disentangling causal effects is challenging because high child support debt may be both a cause and a...

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...

The distribution of family income reflects the distribution of personal income and the composition of families. We develop a non-parametric measure of the impact that changes in family income relationships have on the distribution of family income. Using data from Annual Social and Economic Supplement (the March files) of the Current Population Sur...

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...

This article examines the characteristics and income patterns associated with welfare entry and nonentry in the context of an extended application period for a sample of 1,664 women who applied for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families services in Wisconsin in the fall of 2006. The study uses data derived from the systematic review of caseworker...

Background and Purpose: Major changes in the financing of, and eligibility for, income support programs have raised fundamental questions about the adequacy of the safety net in the United States. The purpose of this study is to understand patterns of multiple program participation, and the prevalence and demographic characteristics of what is beco...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Recent research suggests that program participants have limited knowledge of the rules governing social programs. These knowledge gaps limit program effectiveness. This article uses a unique survey of Wisconsin welfare participants to explore factors associated with whether single mothers have accurate knowledge of child support rules. It also asse...

The authors find an inverse relationship between child support debt and a father's earnings and child support payments. Higher arrears are generally associated with lower payments and lower earnings for fathers, although the patterns vary with fathers’ age and work histories.

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...

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...

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...

We examine the labor market consequences of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), comparing labor market behavior of eligible parents in Wisconsin, which supplements the federal EITC for families with three children, to that of similar parents in states that do not supplement the federal EITC. Data come from the 2000 Census of Population. Most previ...

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...

Given recent changes in the labor force participation and economic standing of women, we ask whether a woman's position in the labor market has become a more important determinant of her position in the marriage market. Unlike much prior research on trends over time in assortative mating, we take an individual-level approach to the analysis and rel...

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...

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...

The argument presented in this article is that although work is one path toward improved well-being for poor families, a successful and humane social welfare policy must recognize and respond to its limitations. The prowork rhetoric surrounding current efforts to move women from welfare to work rests on at least three propositions: Work is the norm...

We develop a simulation method for measuring the impact of changes in the distributions of the main income sources on growth in family income inequality. We simulate the entire distribution of family income under the counterfactual, "What if the distribution of each source had not changed?" The simulation method allows us to evaluate the impact of...

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...

this report. Research assistance was provided by Steven Cook, Sangeun Lee, Kasia O'Neill and Chi-Fang Wu. Data were constructed under the supervision of Patricia Brown. The assistance of Dawn Duren and Elizabeth Evanson is greatly appreciated. W-2 Child Support Demonstration Evaluation (W-2 CSDE)

We estimate the extent to which rising family income inequality can be explained by changes in the earnings of married women. We develop a decomposition equation that separates single persons from married couples (decomposition by population group) and, for married couples, distinguishes the impact of wives ’ earnings from other sources of income (...

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...

Changes in the living arrangements of children have implications for social policy and children’s well-being. Understanding who gets custody on divorce—mother, father, or both sharing custody—can also inform our understanding of family organization and the merits of alternative theories of marriage and divorce. We examine physical-custody outcomes...

Much previous research has focused on how long families receive Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) before leaving the program and whether and when they return to the program following an exit. Few quantitative studies have looked at broader indicators of the economic I well-being of those who have exited AFDC. We use data from the Natio...

We argue that the effect of wives' earnings can be assessed meaningfully only by comparing the observed distribution of income with a reference distribution. The components of the standard decomposition of the Gini coefficient have no implicit reference distribution and therefore should not be interpreted as a measure of the effect of an income sou...

This report examines data from the court record of 9,500 Wisconsin divorce cases in twenty-one representative counties for a period of twelve years, from 1980 to 1992, in order to document how child custody is being handled in divorce. We find an increased involvement of fathers with their children after divorce, particularly through joint legal cu...

Child custody law has changed dramatically over the past twenty-five years, but few have attempted to analyze the impact of these changes with real-world data. In this article, Professors Melli and Cancian and Ms. Brown present data on 9500 divorcing families in Wisconsin over the time period of 1980 to 1992. Based on these data, the authors report...

With the increasing numbers of children affected by divorce and economic vulnerability after divorce, child support is a critical concern of national policymakers. The efforts to increase child support have included a shift to numerical guidelines for the amount of child support orders. Guidelines generally reflect an income-sharing philosophy, in...