The Impact of Child Support Enforcement on Nonmarital and Marital Births: Does It Differ by Racial and Age Groups?

Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this article provides evidence that women who live in states with effective child‐support enforcement, measured as both strict child‐support legislation and high child‐support expenditure, are more likely to have marital births and less likely to have nonmarital births. The findings suggest that the deterrence effect of child‐support enforcement on men dominates the opposite effect of enforcement on women. For African‐American women, effective child‐support enforcement is estimated to decrease nonmarital births strongly. For white women, enforcement is estimated to increase marital births largely.