R E S E A R C H N O T E S
Princeton NJ -- Welfare and child-support policy may be driven by obsolete and incorrect assumptions about who participates, according to researchers in Princeton's Center for Research on Child Wellbeing.
More than half of all American children are expected to live apart from at least one biological parent -- usually the father -- by the time they are 18, largely because of non-marital childbearing. But welfare and child support policies are based on times past, when death and divorce were the main reasons that children lived without dads.
Economist Anne Case and sociologist Sara McLanahan, along with I-Fen Lin of Bowling Green State University, note that while the need for child support has increased dramatically, the proportion of eligible children who receive payments has not changed much since the late 1970s -- despite attempts by Congress to remedy the problem. Landmark welfare legislation in 1996 called for additional child-support enforcement mechanisms.
The Princeton report, "Understanding Child Support Trends: Economic, Demographic, and Political Contributions," is the first to examine this lack of progress by evaluating five explanations, including inflation and the shift to no-fault divorce, over 30 years. It is available online at <www.wws.princeton.edu/~rpds/macarthur/Underchildsupp.pdf>.
The researchers found that two child-support policies -- legislative guidelines for awards and universal wage withholding -- are key to improving support levels, and that awards should be tied to changes in the inflation rate.
Still, current policies work better for divorced mothers than for those who have never been married, the researchers conclude. "Our analyses suggest that further gains in child-support payments will rest with our ability to collect child support for children born to unwed parents," they write. "These children are the fastest-growing group of children in the U.S. and they are the least likely to receive child support."
A study on faculty retirement trends by economists at Princeton and the University of California-Berkeley suggests that most U.S. colleges and universities will experience a significant rise in the percentage of faculty over age 70 in coming years.
Princeton's Orley Ashenfelter and Berkeley's David Card found that the fraction of faculty expected to remain employed until age 72 has risen from less than 10 percent to about 50 percent since 1994, when mandatory retirement of tenured faculty at age 70 was completely abolished.
The researchers conclude that the increase will be experienced at all types of institutions and among all disciplines. Their results contradict two 1991 studies which suggested that the elimination of mandatory retirement was unlikely to have a significant impact on retirement at most institutions.
Those studies "really didn't have the ability to observe the change in law as we did," said Ashenfelter. "We observed what happens to people when they hit that 70 threshold."
The study, which is available at <www.irs.princeton.edu:80/pubs/pdfs/448.pdf>, analyzes detailed administrative records for more than 16,000 older faculty members at 104 colleges and universities across the country.
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