Do High Child Support Orders Discourage Child Support Payments?

This article examines the relationships among child support orders, child support payments, and the compliance rate (payments compared to orders). It uses administrative data from Wisconsin, examining 3 years of orders and payments by fathers who had their first order for child support to a particular mother in 2000. Using fixed‐effects models that attempt to control for unobserved factors, the authors find that the burden of orders (i.e., the proportion of earnings owed for child support) is positively associated with the size of payments but negatively associated with compliance. An alternative method yields the same conclusions. Policy implications are discussed.