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The impact of equal parenting time laws on family outcomes and risky behavior by teenagers: Evidence from Spain
Abstract
Due to legal reforms, equal parenting time (EPT) laws in Spain now apply to approximately 40% of all divorces, with likely implications for family outcomes and teenagers’ risky behavior. Consistent with theories of bargaining power within marriage, we find that EPT laws decrease contentious and wife-initiated divorces and increase the employment of mothers relative to fathers. An analysis of drug use and family relationships, among 165,000 teenagers, further shows that EPT laws significantly decrease risky behavior by teenagers, especially boys, who claim to have better relationships with their father, although more unclear norms for behavior. These results have some international implications, such as for the United States, where more than half of the states are considering whether to adopt EPT laws.
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Using Spanish Social Security records, we document the channels through which mothers fall onto a lower earnings track, such as shifting into part-time work, accumulating lower experience, or transitioning to lower-paying jobs, and are able to explain 71 percent of the unconditional individual fixed-effects motherhood wage gap. The earnings trajectories' analysis reveals that “mothers to be” experience important relative earnings increases several years before giving birth but this earnings' advantage falls right after birth, taking in average nine years to recover. Heterogeneity matters as most of the motherhood dip is driven by workers with permanent contracts.
Symposium: Law and the New American Family Held at Indiana University School of Law - Bloomington Apr. 4, 1997
Research suggests that high parental support and control improves children's well-being. However, a large part of these studies have focused on the parenting of married parents. Research on parenting after a divorce, mainly has focused on parenting of divorced mothers, with few exceptions concentrating primarily on non-residential fathers. Therefore, we compared both parenting dimensions support and control of fathers in different family structures (non-residential fathers, fathers in joint custody and married fathers). We also investigated the association between fathers' parenting dimensions and children's self-esteem, controlled for the parenting dimensions of the mother. Data from 587 children (50 % girls) between 10 and 18 years old and their parents were examined. Results revealed that non-residential fathers (n = 225) were less supportive and controlling than fathers in joint custody (n = 138) and married fathers (n = 224). Nevertheless, having a supportive father was beneficial to children's self-esteem in each family structure. We conclude that, even after a divorce, fathers have the capacity to enhance children's self-esteem and we suggest that future research should investigate this capacity.
This paper presents a model of lifetime utility maximisation in which expectations of future marital transitions play a role in the determination of work hours. Married people with spouses who earn more are predicted to devote additional time to the labour market when they are confronted with a high likelihood of divorce and vice versa. Similarly, work hours should be positively associated with marriage probability for those single people who expect to marry a higher earning spouse. These predictions are tested using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Marriage and divorce probabilities are calculated from Cox proportional hazard models and are included in regressions of annual hours. Married women are found to work more when they face a high probability of divorce. This relationship holds both over an individual’s life-cycle and across people with different inherent risks of divorce. Similar results are found when a woman’s happiness with her marriage is used as a proxy for divorce risk.
We show that there is substantial heterogeneity in women's labor supply elasticities at the micro level and highlight the implications for aggregate behavior. We consider both intertemporal and intratemporal choices, and identify intensive and extensive responses in a consistent life‐cycle framework, using US CEX data. Heterogeneity is due to observables, such as age, wealth, hours worked, and the wage level, as well as to unobservable tastes for leisure: the median Marshallian elasticity for hours worked is 0.18, with corresponding Hicksian elasticity of 0.54 and Frisch elasticity of 0.87. At the 90th percentile, these values are 0.79, 1.16, and 1.92. Responses at the extensive margin explain about 54% of the total labor supply response for women under 30, although this declines with age. Aggregate elasticities are higher in recessions, and increase with the length of the recession. The heterogeneity at the micro level means that the aggregate labor supply elasticity is not a structural parameter: any aggregate elasticity will depend on the demographic structure of the economy as well as the distribution of wealth and the particular point in the business cycle.
Joint physical custody (JPC), a parental care arrangement in which a child lives with each parent for at least 25-50% of the time after separation or divorce, is increasingly common in many Western societies. This is a major shift from the standard of sole physical custody, with mostly mothers providing primary childcare after a parental separation or divorce. The increasing share of separated or divorced parents who practice JPC, which in some countries, US states, and regions reaches 30% and more, results from increasing gender equality due to mothers participating considerably in the labor force and fathers being actively involved in their children's daily lives. This review focuses on the effects of JPC on children's and parents' well-being, based on 40 studies from North America, Australia, and Europe published between 2007 and 2018. In sum, there is empirical evidence from different countries that suggests that JPC arrangements can have positive effects on the well-being of children and of parents. However, the existing studies are conceptually, methodologically, and contextually very heterogeneous. In addition, self-selected highly educated parents with a high socio-economic status, a low conflict level, and children between the ages of 6-15 practicing JPC dominate the samples. Thus, the risks and benefits of JPC are not clear yet and are heavily debated by advocates and academics. The review concludes with suggestions for future research.
© 2018 Family Process Institute.
Is joint physical custody (JPC) linked to any better or worse outcomes for children than sole physical custody (SPC) after considering family income and parental conflict? In the 60 studies published in English in academic journals or in government reports, 34 studies found that JPC children had better outcomes on all of the measures of behavioral, emotional, physical, and academic well-being and relationships with parents and grandparents. In 14 studies, JPC children had equal outcomes on some measures and better outcomes on others compared to SPC children. In 6 studies JPC and SPC children were equal on all measures. In 6 studies, JPC children were worse on one of the measures than SPC children, but equal or better on all other measures. In the 25 studies that considered family income, JPC children had better outcomes on all measures in 18 studies, equal to better outcomes in 4 studies, equal outcomes in 1 study, and worse outcomes on one measure but equal or better outcomes on other measures in 2 studies. In the 19 studies that included parental conflict, JPC children had better outcomes on all measures in 9 studies, equal to better outcomes in 5 studies, equal outcomes in 2 studies, and worse outcomes on one measure but equal or better outcomes on other measures in 3 studies. In sum, independent of family income or parental conflict, JPC is generally linked to better outcomes for children.
This paper investigates the impact of the joint child custody reforms on family labour supply in the United States between the 1970s and 1990s. Following the work of Chiappori et al. (Journal of Political Economy, 2002, 110 (1): 37–72), we propose a collective labour supply model in which the custody reforms play roles of a distribution factor that influences household bargaining power. In the empirical section, using data from the March Current Population Survey and Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we find a significantly positive influence of the legality on married women's labour supply and a negative influence on their husbands’. Checking robustness with different groups: non-migrant couples, couples with children under 18, couples with children before the passage of the laws, couples married before the reforms and couples with non-anti-divorce religious preference, we find the results are consistent with those of the baseline model.
Previous literature has established that unilateral divorce laws may reduce women’s household work and overall marital investment. If unilateral divorce has differential costs by gender, it may impact household work by gender through bargaining channels. However, little research has examined how divorce laws affect men’s levels and share of household production. To examine this, I use data on matched couples from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and exploit time variation in state divorce laws. I find that unilateral divorce laws lead to a decrease in marital investment, as measured by mens’ and women’s household work. The evidence also supports a bargaining response to divorce laws, as fathers in states without joint-custody laws engage in a significantly higher share of household work under unilateral divorce than those in states with joint-custody laws, consistent with a higher cost of marital dissolution among fathers who stand to lose custody of their children.
This article studies shared physical custody in Sweden, the country in the world where the phenomenon is most prevalent. We ask whether children in shared physical custody settings are more likely to report high levels of stress compared to children living in sole custody. The analysis is based on data with combined information from parents, children, and administrative registers. The models are controlled control for interparental as well as parent–child relationship quality and parents’ income. The results show that children sharing residence equally have lower likelihood of experiencing high levels of stress. The results can be interpreted as evidence for a positive effect of continuing everyday-like parental relationships after a family dissolution.
There has been a recent interest in reporting -values adjusted for resampling-based stepdown multiple testing procedures proposed in Romano and Wolf (2005a,b). The original papers only describe how to carry out multiple testing at a fixed significance level. Computing adjusted -values instead in an efficient manner is not entirely trivial. Therefore, this paper fills an apparent gap by detailing such an algorithm.
In a joint custody regime, both parents are given equal preference by the court while granting the custodial rights of their children in the event of divorce. Using 50 years of census data for the United States’ population, I show that growing up in a joint custody regime leads to lower educational attainment and worse labor market outcomes. My results are robust to different model specifications and apply to both males and females.
This paper studies the impact of the introduction of joint custody in Italy (Law 54/2006) on judiciary outcomes. As to the formal (legal) assignment of joint custody, the reform envisaged very little judge discretion. With reference to the substance of the custody (the amount of time each parent spends with the child and the money involved in post-dissolution arrangements), the law established new principles while leaving plenty of implementation power to the judges. Our results – based on court data that covers the universe of separations from 2000 to 2010 – document that the law was only cosmetically applied by the judges. Compared to the prereform regime, the share of sole legal custody assignments to the mother drastically decreased. However, court implementation washed out the new principles: the provisions of the law related to the financial postseparation arrangements remained unapplied. This suggests that the main innovative aspect of the law – the possibility for a child to spend an adequate amount of time with both parents – was also left unchanged with respect to the previous regime of sole maternal custody. As joint effect of the introduction of the law and the little degree to which the new principles have been translated into actual verdicts, there was a surge in litigiousness among separating spouses and judicial inefficiency. Moreover, the incentives for a female partner to apply for a separation raised. The paper discusses a possible rationale for the findings and some related policy remedies. As for the former, the evidence we present can be explained by the adoption of genderbiased judiciary practices. As for the latter, our results suggest that a restatement of the law, to define a narrowed grid of prescriptions that constrain judge discretion, could be an effective corrective action.
We employed meta-analytic methods to pool information from 63 studies dealing with nonresident fathers and children's well-being. Fathers' payment of child support was positively associated with measures of children's well-being. The frequency of contact with nonresident fathers was not related to child outcomes in general. Two additional dimensions of the father-child relationship—feelings of closeness and authoritative parenting—were positively associated with children's academic success and negatively associated with children's externalizing and internalizing problems.
Since the 1970s almost all US states have introduced a form of joint custody after divorce. I analyze the causal effect of these custody law reforms on different family outcomes. My identification strategy exploits the different timing of reforms across the US states. Estimations based on state panel data suggest that the introduction of joint custody led to an increase in marriage rates, an increase in overall fertility (including a shift from nonmarital to marital fertility), and an increase in divorce rates for older couples. Accordingly, female labor market participation decreased. Further, male suicide rates and domestic violence fell in treated states. The empirical evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that joint custody increased the relative bargaining power of men within marriage.
We examine the effect of joint custody on marriage, divorce, fertility and female employment in Austria using individual-level administrative data, covering the entire population. We also use unique data obtained from court records to analyze the effect on post-divorce outcomes. Our estimates show that joint custody significantly reduces divorce and female employment rates, significantly increases marriage and marital birth rates, and leads to a substantial increase in the total money transfer received by mothers after divorce. We interpret these results as evidence against Becker-Coase bargains and in support of a mechanism driven by a resource redistribution that favors men giving them greater incentives to invest in marriage specific capital.
The paper analyzes the effect of a reform granting alimony rights to cohabiting couples in Canada, exploiting the fact that each province extended these rights in different years and required different cohabitation length. A theoretical analysis, based on a collective household model with a matching framework, predicts that changes in alimony laws would affect existing couples and couples to-be differently. For existing couples, legislative changes aimed at favoring (wo)men do benefit them, especially if the match quality is low. However, for couples not yet formed, they generate offsetting intra-household transfers (in our model, of leisure) and lower intra-marital allocations for the spouses who are the intended beneficiary. Our empirical analysis confirms these predictions. Among cohabiting couples united long enough before the reform, obtaining the right to petition for alimony led women to lower their labor force participation. These results, however, do not hold | and, in some cases, are reversed for newly formed cohabiting couples.
Using data from the 1987-1988 National Survey of Families and Households, we evaluate the extent to which cohabitation is similar to marriage. The quality of recently formed cohabiting and marital relationships among Black and White Americans ages 19 to 48 is investigated in an effort to advance our understanding of the meaning of cohabitation relative to marriage. Controlling for relationship duration and demographic characteristics of the respondent, we find that cohabitors in general report poorer relationship quality than their married counterparts. However, cohabitors' marriage plans largely explain the difference in relationship quality of cohabitors and marrieds. The majority of cohabitors report plans to marry their partner, and these cohabitors are involved in unions that are not significantly different from marriages. In fact, cohabitors report more frequent interaction with their partners than do marrieds. The relationship quality of marrieds and cohabitors with plans to marry is affected in the same way by the presence of potential sources of stress such as biological children, children from past unions, and prior union experience.
Non-cooperative couples are inefficient. Cooperation raises the utility of both parents, and of each child, but does not guarantee efficiency. In the presence of credit rationing, a cooperative equilibrium may not exist outside marriage, because the main earner cannot credibly promise to compensate the main childcarer at some future date, and may not be able or willing to do so at front. By allowing the main childcarer to credibly threaten divorce if the main earner does not deliver the promised compensation when the time comes, marriage makes that promise credible, and thus increases the probability that a cooperative equilibrium will exist. In a separate-property jurisdiction, a reduction in the cost or difficulty of obtaining a divorce increases married women’s participation in the labour market. In a community-property one, it has no such effect.
Mediation and other forms of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) grew rapidly in the last few decades as a result of high divorce rates, frequent conflicts between parting parents, the resulting administrative burden on courts, and especially concerns about damaging effects on children and postdivorce family relationships. This article focuses on our longitudinal research involving randomized trials of mediation and adversary settlement to support the conclusions that mediation can: (1) settle a large percentage of cases otherwise headed for court; (2) possibly speed settlement, save money, and increase compliance with agreements; (3) clearly increase party satisfaction; and (4) most importantly, lead to remarkably improved relationships between nonresidential parents and children, as well as between divorced parents—even twelve years after dispute settlement. The key “active ingredients” of mediation are likely to include: (1) the call for parental cooperation over the long run of co-parenting beyond the crisis of separation, (2) the opportunity to address underlying emotional issues (albeit briefly), (3) helping parents to establish a businesslike relationship, and (4) the avoidance of divisive negotiations at a critical time for family relationships. We call for more research on mediation and other forms of ADR, as well as a renewal of the excitement and optimism of the “first generation” of mediators, qualities that are “active ingredients” in any successful social or psychological intervention.
We investigate whether a change in the expectation of child custody affects the amount of time that married mothers and fathers devote to market and household work. Data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) coupled with plausibly exogenous variation in the adoption of joint-custody laws across states and time allow us to examine how the prospect of shared child custody affects within-marriage time allocation. We exploit the longitudinal feature of the PSID to adjust our estimates for sample selection based on the reform’s potential impact on the composition of the married couples. We find that custody reform induces a reallocation of time within marriage, with mothers working more in the market and fathers working more in the home.
Using a unique data set on divorcing couples, we analyze the effects of a change in legal entitlement on the outcomes for divorcing couples. In particular, we analyze the 1997 change to custody provisions in the State of Oregon. Prior to 1997, Oregon assigned custody, based on the discretion of the court, in the best interests of the child. This was changed to a presumption- of joint parenting, which manifests in the courts encouraging and imposing joint (or shared) custody in cases that otherwise would have had sole custody arrangements. We find that the law had several implications for divorce behavior: different custody outcomes (less sole custody to mothers, more sole custody to fathers), more mediation, longer times until the final divorce, and more acrimonious divorces (more abuse actions filed). We find no evidence that spouses attempted to bargain around the change of legal entitlement.
Can family policy affect well-being of individuals without altering the resources available to their families? This article examines the extension of alimony rights and obligations to cohabiting couples in Brazil. For women in intact relationships, alimony rights upon dissolution should improve outside options, strengthening their negotiating positions, and increasing their influence over intrahousehold allocation of resources. Robust econometric evidence indicates that more decision power in the hands of women impacts hours worked by female adults and investments in the education of children. This suggests that family policy and models of family decision making should take intrahousehold heterogeneity of preferences into account.
Research on child custody primarily focuses on the well-being of children following divorce. We extend this literature by examining how the prospect of joint child custody affects within-marriage investment in children through changes in household bargaining power. Variation in the timing of joint-custody reforms across states provides a natural-experiment framework with which to examine within-marriage investment in children. The probability of children's private school attendance declines by 12% in states that adopt joint-custody laws. We also find evidence linking joint-custody reform to higher rates of labor force participation for married mothers, which may indicate less time devoted household production.
If participation in the labor market helps to secure women's outside options in the case of divorce/separation, an increase in the perceived risk of marital dissolution may accelerate the increase in female labor supply. This simple prediction has been tested in the literature using time and/or spatial variation in divorce legislation (e.g., across US states), leading to mixed results. In this paper, we suggest testing this hypothesis by exploiting a more radical policy change, i.e., the legalization of divorce. In Ireland, the right to divorce was introduced in 1996, followed by an acceleration of marriage breakdown rates. We use this fundamental change in the Irish society as a natural experiment. We follow a difference-in-difference approach, using families for whom the dissolution risk is small as a control group. Our results suggest that the legalization of divorce contributed to a significant increase in female labor supply, mostly at the extensive margin. Results are not driven by selection and are robust to several specification checks, including the introduction of household fixed effects and an improved match between control and treatment groups using propensity score reweighting.
The failure of many divorced fathers to comply with court-mandated child support awards has been identified as a major reason why a growing number of children live in poverty in female-headed households. This paper presents a model that seeks to explain why so many divorced fathers allow their children's welfare to suffer as a consequence of divorce. The point of departure is the recognition that children are collective consumption goods from the point of view of the father and mother. Within marriage, proximity and altruism serve to overcome the "free-rider" problem associated with the provision of public goods. However, on divorce the noncustodial parent suffers a loss of control over the allocative decisions of the custodial parent and it is not feasible for the couple to achieve a Pareto-optimal allocation of their joint resources. A model of optimal marriage contracts is constructed in which a couple decides on the allocation of resources within marriage and on the terms of a settlement in the event ...
This paper analyses a matching model of the marriage market with directed, on-the-job search. Everyone is born attractive but "matures" according to a Poisson process into unattractiveness. Marriages between equally attractive people are stable but mixed marriages are not. The implied patterns of marriage and divorce are consistent with those identified in the empirical literature. When the utility from being single is low, in order to commit to their relationship, attractive people in mixed marriages may voluntarily divest of their attractiveness. (Copyright: Elsevier)
Families, primarily female-headed minority households with children, living in high-poverty public housing projects in five U.S. cities were offered housing vouchers by lottery in the Moving to Opportunity program. Four to seven years after random assignment, families offered vouchers lived in safer neighborhoods that had lower poverty rates than those of the control group not offered vouchers. We find no significant overall effects of this intervention on adult economic self-sufficiency or physical health. Mental health benefits of the voucher offers for adults and for female youth were substantial. Beneficial effects for female youth on education, risky behavior, and physical health were offset by adverse effects for male youth. For outcomes that exhibit significant treatment effects, we find, using variation in treatment intensity across voucher types and cities, that the relationship between neighborhood poverty rate and outcomes is approximately linear. Copyright The Econometric Society 2007.
Applying the Coase Theorem to marital bargaining suggests that shifting from consent to unilateral divorce laws will not affect divorce rates. I show that existing evidence suggesting large effects of divorce laws on divorce rates reflect a failure to explicitly model the dynamic response of divorce rates to a shock to the legal regime. When accounting for these dynamics, I find that unilateral divorce spiked following the adoption of unilateral divorce laws, but that this rise largely reversed itself within a decade. Overall, these changes in family law explain very little of the rise in divorce over the past half-century. (JEL C78, J12)
Child-custody reform and the division of labor in the household
- Altindag
Calidoscopio de la custodia compartida en España
- Solsona
Calidoscopio de la custodia compartida en España
- Montserrat Solsona
- Spijker
- Jeroen
- Marc Ajenjo
Solsona, Montserrat, Spijker, Jeroen, Ajenjo, Marc, 2017. Calidoscopio de la custodia compartida en España. In La custodia compartida en España 45-72
Dykinson.