Child support wage withholding and father–child contact: parental bargaining and salience effects

Past research on child support finds that father–child contact increases as support payments increase. Enforcement policies such as wage withholding also may affect father–child contact even when the amount of support paid is not affected if they change bargaining power between parents or the salience of fathers’ child support obligations. I develop a model of the salience of child support obligations which predicts that introduction of automatic withholding will reduce contact between noncustodial parents and children independent of payment amount. I then examine whether paying child support via wage withholding affects fathers’ frequency of contact with their children and their provision of in-kind support using instrumental variables and bounded OLS techniques for selection on unobservables. Withholding appears to decrease father–child contact. Withholding effects do not occur when payments are made to government agencies or courts but are present when payments go directly to the mother, consistent with bargaining models. More frequent payment schedules are associated with more contact, consistent with salience effects.     

Güterverteilungsmatrizen und ihre Bewertung

The distribution of personal income comprises information about the distribution of possible but not actual provisions of households or individuals with goods and services. Value judgements about the actual provisions with goods and services, therefore, should not be confounded on the distribution of personal income. In this paper we are discussing matrices for the distribution with goods and services with m columns (goods and services) and n rows (individuals or households). We distinguish between matrices with columns adding up to personal income and matrices with columns which do not add up to something meaningful. We also analyse problems which arise when either some columns are meant to desire special attention (‘specific egalitarianism’) or when some rows are seperated for special treatment (measurement of relative poverty). Finally, we concentrate on problems of comparing two such matrices. Methodological means are Lorenz-Curves, Concentration-Curves, Gini Coefficients with decompositions and reasonable generalisations thereof.     

What’s Wrong with the HIPC Initiative and What’s Next?

This article reviews the problems of the enhanced HIPC initiative and outlines possible steps towards a more efficient debt and poverty reduction initiative. After brief comments on the rationale for debt relief, it analyses some key issues related to the HIPC initiative’s aim to achieve debt sustainability, describes other fundamental problems of the HIPC framework, and discusses some less known but still crucial flaws of the initiative. It then proceeds with necessary improvements for an efficient debt reduction programme, possible modifications for a revised HIPC initiative, and some suggestions on how to overcome financing constraints. Apart from being in several respects unfair, the current framework is unlikely to permit a lasting exit from unsustainable debt for many HIPCs, and may lead to a decline in traditional development assistance.