Effects of Child Support Pass-Through and Disregard Policies on In-Kind Child Support

Abstract

This paper examines whether states' elimination of child support disregards for welfare payments after welfare reform caused non-custodial parents to increase in-kind support. I use longitudinal data from the Survey of Program Dynamics and take advantage of state and year variation in child support disregard policies before and after the 1996 welfare reform to identify effects of the disregard on in-kind support. I find that a $100 decrease in the disregard corresponds to a 4.1 percent increase in the probability a child will receive in-kind child support.