The Law And Economics Of Child Support Payments

'This urgently needed, groundbreaking book provides solid data that coincides with the real life stories I have been hearing for years from men and women nationwide regarding unfair child support laws and policies that have resulted in adverse effects on their children and families. I anticipate that this book will have a major positive impact on social policy and the general collective attitudes toward families in today's society. The information presented in this book must be read and understood by every policymaker to insure that child support policies are made just and fair so that all families can prosper.' - Dianna Thompson, National Family Justice Association, US The delinquent payment of child support by non-custodial to custodial parents is a major problem throughout the United States. To many observers, the problem is one of 'deadbeat dads' - men who simply will not make the required payments. The solution has been to enforce payment by the imposition of increasingly stringent civil and criminal penalties. Despite these efforts, the percentage of single mothers receiving child support has changed very little over the past twenty-five years. The Law and Economics of Child Support Payments investigates why this is, and approaches the payment of child support as an economic problem.

An analysis of child support payments during the 1980s which assesses what went right and what went wrong with them. The authors investigate the socioeconomic and legal factors that determined child support awards and receipts and offer policy recommendations for the future.

Taking a novel approach to child support policy analysis, Single Parents and Child Support Systems locates the transfer of payments between separated parents within a wider social policy ecosystem and compares the political, institutional and administrative dimensions of child support policy enactment across the globe. Featuring contributions from an interdisciplinary collective of researchers in social policy, social work, sociology, economics and law, the book assesses how child support policies align conceptually with other social policies. Single Parents and Child Support Systems begins by setting out how children's and single parents' economic welfare is conceived across countries in relation to the triple burden of financial, caring and administrative responsibilities faced by single mothers. Chapters map how post-separation child support policy reinforces or breaks from the gender and family logics that underpin welfare and family policies in 10 different countries spanning corporatist, liberal and Nordic welfare regimes. Offering extensive coverage of a diverse range of international legal provisions and social policies, this stimulating book will be an essential resource for academics and researchers of social policy, social work, family law and gender studies. Its practical insights and suggested avenues for reform will also benefit policy makers, child support administrators and legal professionals.

Written by one of the UK's leading scholars of welfare law, this book analyses the current child support legislation in its broader historical and social context, synthesising both doctrinal and socio-legal approaches to legal research and scholarship. The book draws on the historical and legal literature on the Poor Law and the development of both the public and private law obligation of child maintenance. Modern child support law must also be considered in the context of both social and demographic changes and in the light of popular norms about child maintenance liabilities. The main part of the book is devoted to an analysis of the modern child support scheme, and the key issues are addressed: the distinction between applications in 'private' and 'benefit' cases and the extent to which the courts retain a role in child maintenance matters; the basis for, and the justification for, the exception from the obligation for parents with care on benefit to co-operate with the Child Support Agency where they fear 'undue harm or distress'; the assessment of income for the purposes of the formula and the evidential difficulties this entails; the tension between the formula, which ignores the parent with care's income, and the demands of distributive justice; the further conflict between the formula, under which liability is capped only for the very wealthy, and the traditional approach of private law, which is premised on children being entitled to maintenance rather than a share in family wealth; the treatment of special cases under the formula by way of 'variations' (formerly 'departures'); the nature of decision-making and the scope for appeals; and the efficacy of the provisions relating to collection and enforcement. This book has been shortlisted for the 2007 SLSA Book Prize.

This comprehensive volume brings to light little known implications of legal, economic, and custodial factors following a divorce. The Consequences of Divorce goes beyond the past decade's extensive focus on emotional and social adjustment outcomes to explore in-depth the post-divorce legal, economic, and custodial variables that impact the entire family. This important volume examines the economic conditions of both marriage partners after the divorce, the effect of legislative models on child support payment, child custody patterns and their impact on the family, and intervention strategies that take such custody problems into account. Teachers, counselors, researchers, and attorneys will be better prepared to offer support to family members after a divorce with the understanding of the economic and custodial conflicts that they will gain from this new book. The authoritative contributors examine statistics that show a marked decline in the economic well-being of women and children, which lead to questions of standards of adequacy for child support awards and an exploration of a new child support scheme from Australia. Different child custody arrangements are analyzed according to their consequences for each family member, providing valuable information for treating divorced families. Specific topics of interest include decreased parental involvement for fathers after a divorce, siblings separated by divorce, mothers without custody, and children's own viewpoints of custody arrangements. This informative book will lead to increased services to divorced families by expanding professionals’awareness of critical economic and legal issues that affect each member of the family.

What sort of contract is marriage? What does it offer the parties? What are the difficulties of enforcement, and the result of failed effective enforcement? This book takes an economic approach to marriage and divorce, considering the key role of incentives in family law: it highlights the possible adverse consequences emanating from faulty legal design, while demonstrating that good family law should provide incentives for consistent and honest behavior. Economists, specialists in the economic analysis of law, and academic lawyers discuss recent advances in specialist work on marriage, cohabitation, and divorce. Chapters are grouped around four topics: the contractual perspectives on marriage commitment; the regulatory framework surrounding divorce; bargaining and commitment issues relating to marriage and near-marriage arrangements; and finally empirical work, which focuses on the impact of more liberal divorce laws. This important new study will be of considerable interest to lawyers, policy-makers and economists concerned with family law.

A great deal of economics is about law - the functioning of markets, property rights and their enforcement, financial obligations, and so forth - yet these legal aspects are almost never addressed in the academic study of economics. Conversely, the study and practice of law entails a significant understanding of economics, yet the drafting and administration of laws often ignore economic principle. The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law is uniquely placed by the quality, breadth and depth of its coverage to address this need for building bridges. Drawn from the ranks of academics, professional lawyers, and economists in eight countries, the 340 contributors include world experts in their fields. Among them are Nobel laureates in economics and eminent legal scholars. First published in 1998 and now available in paperback for the first time, The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law has established itself as a classic reference work in this important field.