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Arrearages, Lying-in Orders, and Child Support Compliance among Fathers of W-2 Children in Wisconsin

This paper is based on a report prepared under Contract C-680 between the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development and the Institute for Research on Poverty. Any views expressed in this report are those of the author and not necessarily those of the sponsoring institutions. Kisun Nam provided outstanding research assistance for this project. INTRODUCTION The presence of high child support arrearages is an area of increasing concern to policymakers. The accumulation of such arrears is troublesome in that it implies both a lack of resources provided to custodial families (in the case of arrears owed to families) and a lack of reimbursement to the state for expenses that could, at least in principle, be recovered. The persistence of arrears also creates its own problems, including difficulty in meeting state performance targets; effort expended on enforcement; hardships for low-income fathers, many of whom have few realistic prospects for paying off their debts; and potentially secondary impacts on child support compliance, because parents with large child support debts may be less inclined to cooperate with the child support system. The last of these problems—potential negative impacts on subsequent child support compliance—is the focus of this report. The notion that arrears have a deterrent effect on child support payments has been raised repeatedly in the qualitative literature (see, e.g., Pate, 2002; Waller and Plotnick, 2001). However, there have only been limited efforts to examine this quantitatively. This reflects, in part, the difficulty in determining the direction of causality between arrears and subsequent compliance. That is, fathers with low propensity to comply with orders will likely have high arrearages. In this report, I build on recent work by Bartfeld and Meyer (2003) to examine the relationship between child support arrearages owed to the state and subsequent compliance with ongoing support obligations, using a framework that recognizes that the determinants of compliance differ for employed and nonemployed fathers. I use an instrumental variable approach to enable causal inferences about the relationship between arrears and subsequent compliance. In contrast to prior work, I attempt to disentangle the effects of overall arrearages, which may accrue for a variety of reasons, from the effects of having an obligation to pay birth-related costs (known as lying-in costs). 2 BACKGROUND