Chien-Chung Huang James Kunz Irwin Garfinkel The Effect of Child Support on Welfare Exits and Re-Entries Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 21, No. 4, 557–576 (2002) © 2002 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/pam.10073 Manuscript received September 2000; review completed January 2001; revision completed January 2002; accepted May 2002. Abstract Much of the literature on welfare dynamics has focused on the effects of recipi- ent characteristics and state-level characteristics such as welfare benefits and economic conditions; there has been very little analysis on the effects of child support. This paper, using the 1979-1996 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, examines whether child support affects the likelihood of leaving and re-entering welfare. The results indicate that strong child support enforcement is important in helping young mothers exit and stay off welfare. Women with $1000 child sup- port payments in the previous year were 18 percent more likely to exit welfare and 12 percent less likely to re-enter welfare. Compared with women in states that pursued child support least vigorously, women in states that had passed exten- sive child support enforcement legislation and that spent more money on child support enforcement were 79 percent more likely to exit welfare and about 60 percent less likely to re-enter welfare. © 2002 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. INTRODUCTION The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) is the most recent noteworthy public policy enactment designed to improve the collection of private child support. An oft-stated rationale for these poli- cies, which dates back to the passage of the 1975 Child Support Enforcement Amendments, is to foster self-sufficiency in female-headed households and to enforce parental responsibility in order to eliminate reliance on welfare programs, such as the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (AFDC). This ration- ale is largely grounded in an economic perspective. Strong child support enforce- ment reduces the proportion of single mothers who will rely on welfare both by increasing the economic security of mothers and by being more complementary to work. Child support payments increase income and thus reduce the mother’s need and eligibility for welfare. In addition, compared with welfare, child support is less likely to reduce incentives to work and therefore more compatible with work, par- ticularly for women who are more likely to end up on welfare (Garfinkel, Heintze, and Huang, 2001).