Welfare, Child Support, and Strategic Behavior: Do High Orders and Low Disregards Discourage Child Support Awards?

Qualitative research has documented strategic behavior in response to child support policy. Parents of children on welfare have an incentive to avoid formal child support, since most states limit the amount of formal child support that women on welfare can receive (the "disregard") and have relatively high child support orders for low-income fathers. This paper develops a simple model to make several predictions about how the disregard and order might interact to influence formal child support orders. Using data from the CPS-CSS merged with state child support variables, I find some evidence that higher orders and lower disregards are associated with fewer child support orders.