High rates of incarceration among American men, coupled with a high prevalence of fatherhood among the incarcerated, have led to millions of children and families whose fathers are, or have been, in the nation's jails and prisons. This study uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Survey to estimate the extent to which paternal incarceration increases family material hardship. Analyses from a series of longitudinal regression models suggest that material hardship is statistically significant and positively associated with paternal incarceration. These hardships are found to reflect not only a reduction in fathers' income and financial contributions but also an increase in financial and other family strains. The findings underscore the challenges facing families with incarcerated fathers. They also emphasize the need for efforts by criminal justice agencies and social service providers to help mitigate the risks associated with paternal incarceration.
In the shadow of rising divorce and non-marital birth rates, nearly two-thirds of all American children today will live apart from at least one of their parents, usually the father. Clearly this astonishing proportion of non-resident fathers has serious implications for the economic, employment, and educational status of mothers and the development and wellbeing of children. But according to the authors of Fathers Under Fire, a more comprehensive perspective on non-resident fathers - understanding their capacities and circumstances, acknowledging their responses to policy changes, and recognising their needs -- is essential in order to derive value from the past twenty years of policy change, and to design more effective policies for the future. Fathers Under Fire is intended as a first step toward public policy that reflects the interests of children, families, and society as a whole - by including the diverse perspectives and potential of non-resident fathers. The book traces the recent evolution of child support policy which is shifting the burden of supporting children in single parent families from the public and mothers to non-resident fathers. Fathers Under Fire argues that, as yet, the shift has neither improved the standard of living for mothers and children, nor helped the fathers to be able to meet their obligations. The authors explore the various 'side effects' of rigorous enforcement, especially for low-income fathers, finding that 1) a 'proportional standard' of support determination would improve compliance without economically crippling those fathers who are already hovering in or near poverty; 2) child support enforcement does seem to reduce the likelihood of both remarriage and subsequent out-of-wedlock births for low-income non-resident fathers; 3) payment of support does tend to coincide (for better and worse) with seeing the children more often, and having more influence in child-rearing decisions.
The extent to which higher per pupil expenditures lead to any desirable outputs is an important policy question. We develop several alternative models which relate per pupil school expenditures to achievement orientation, verbal ability, years of schooling, and earnings. Our results indicate that the point estimate for the rate of return to increases in per pupil school expenditures is quite respectable for whites and very high for blacks irrespective of the model used. However, in one plausible model it is not possible to reject the hypothesis that the rate of return to whites is zero. In contrast, the results for blacks are not only consistently large, but also robust.
The measurement of economic inequality is conventionally based upon statistical indicators of the variation in annual family money income. While the values of and temporal changes in such indicators are of interest, they mask the contribution of numerous underlying determinants of economic inequality. In this study we focus on two of the primary causes of inequality-variation among economic units in the capacity to generate income and variation in the utilization of that capacity-and estimate the contribution of each to measured income inequality.1 Although income inequality stems from several interdependent factors, it can be partitioned into the variation in earnings capacity and variation in its use. This latter variation, we will attribute to choice.
