Law Commons^™

Getting Blood From Stones: Results And Policy Implications Of An Empirical Investigation Of Child Support Practice In St. Joseph County, Indiana Paternity Actions, Margaret F. Brinig, Marsha Garrison

Journal Articles

Today, there is consensus that the current system of calculating and enforcing support obligations does not work well for disadvantaged families, most of which are nonmarital. Nonmarital children are less likely to have support orders established than marital children, and they are much less likely to experience full payment.

In this paper, we report data on parenting time, child support calculation, and enforcement actions in a population of nonmarital children for whom paternity actions were brought, in 2008 or 2010, in St. Joseph County, Indiana. The computerized, court-based record system we utilized to collect data gave us access to information …

Chickens And Eggs: Does Custody Move Support, Or Vise-Versa?, Margaret Brinig

Journal Articles

Most, if not all, of the theoretical work on child support presupposes that it becomes an issue only when couples separate, that is, that the flow moves between custody and child support and that the duty to make monetary payments is typically owed by the noncustodial parent. (I realize, of course, that there can be issues regarding the identity of the payor and that there are criminal and civil actions possible when parents refuse or neglect to provide support to dependent children.) Some empirical work confirms the relationship between the two. For example, Judith Seltzer, Weiss and Willis, and Brinig …

Shared Parenting Laws: Mistakes Of Pooling?, Margaret F. Brinig

Journal Articles

In their recent paper “Anti-Herding Regulation,” forthcoming in the Harvard Business Review, Ian Ayres and Joshua Mitts argue that many well-intentioned public policy regulations potentially harm rather than help situations. That is, because they seek to pool — or herd — groups of people, treating them as equal, they miss or mask important differences among the regulated, thus magnifying systematic risk. Anti-herding regulation, on the other hand, can produce socially beneficial information, in their words steering “both private and public actors toward better evidence-based outcomes.” Left to their own, or with various carrot-and-stick incentives, some groups, anyway, would instead fare …

Child Support Guidelines And Divorce Incentives, Margaret F. Brinig, Douglas W. Allen

Journal Articles

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 eventually 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 some families with high incomes. This may explain why …

Child Support Guidelines: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, Margaret F. Brinig, Douglas W. Allen

Journal Articles

Child support guideline systems do more than simply determine the amount of income to be transferred from the noncustodial to the custodial household. They create incentives, one way or another, for spouses to divorce and seek custody and support payments. We examine three cases found in North America, and find that the common method of income shares provides a decent guideline that does not create any perverse incentives for divorce. Percentage-of-obligor-income methods do worse than other systems, and can cause increases in divorce rates for families in which one spouse earns a high income. Finally, the Canadian system, which is …

Removing Nonconforming Child Support Payments From The Shadow Of The Rule Against Retroactive Modification: A Proposal For Judicial Discretion, John Eric Smithburn

Journal Articles

Whether and under what circumstances a parent who is ordered to pay child support is entitled to credit against a child support arrearage is one of the most vexing problems for the family court. Some courts consistently demand strict adherence to a child support order and do not permit retroactive modification. Other courts have allowed retroactive modification of support decrees when equity dictates. A recent amendment to the Social Security Act, however, prohibits retroactive modification of child support orders, leaving a number of unanswered questions concerning credit requests for nonconforming support payments.

This Article explores the problems created by nonconforming …