We present new estimates of unwed fathers’ ability to pay child support. Prior research relied on surveys that drastically undercounted nonresident unwed fathers and provided no link to their children who lived in separate households. To overcome these limitations, previous research assumed assortative mating and that each mother partnered with one father who was actually eligible to pay support and had no other child support obligations. Because the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study contains data on couples, multiple-partner fertility, and a rich array of other previously unmeasured characteristics of fathers, it is uniquely suited to address the limitations of previous research. We also use an improved method of dealing with missing data. Our findings suggest that previous research overestimated the aggregate ability of unwed nonresident fathers to pay child support by 33% to 60%.
The past four decades saw a steep increase in nonmarital births in the United States, alongside high rates of child poverty and welfare dependence among female-headed families. These trends gave rise to the seemingly reasonable expectation that child support should play a key role in improving the circumstances of poor children and easing the burden on the public purse. Compared with just 6% in 1960, nonmarital births currently account for fully one-third of all births, and up to twice that proportion for some racial/ethnic groups. Although about half of new unwed parents cohabit (Bumpass and Sweet 1989; Nepomnyaschy 2003), most cohabitors with children break up over time, making the vast majority of unwed fathers potentially liable for child support.
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There are two ways in which existing estimates of fathers’ ability to pay child support are particularly problematic. The first challenge is the underreporting of unwed parenthood (Hanson, McLanahan, and Thompson 1996; Sorensen 1997), a problem that has been addressed using various imputation strategies to estimate the earnings of missing fathers. We hypothesize that the data and methodological limitations in prior studies are likely to have produced upwardly biased estimates of fathers’ earnings. The second challenge concerns the complex structure of present-day families. We hypothesize that by failing to account for mortality, non-identifiable fathers, and multiple-partner fertility, previous estimates have likely further overstated fathers’ ability to pay because they assume one father who has no other child support obligations for each eligible mother with nonmarital children. This article addresses both these issues by applying new methods to new data. The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS) was especially designed to extend research on child support. We combine a rich set of previously unavailable variables concerning men’s fertility, mortality, and other relevant characteristics, with improved imputation strategies to produce new estimates of fathers’ earnings and obligations.