Assessing the Causal Relationship between Child Support and Visitation

Elaine Sorensen, Urban Institute
Kate Pomper, Urban Institute

This study assesses whether paying child support encourages nonresident fathers to visit their children, using nonresident fathers’ and custodial mothers’ reports from a recent nationally representative survey. Although the survey only identifies about 70% of nonresident fathers, we conduct this analysis because of the importance of understanding nonresident fathers’ perceptions of their child support payments and visitation. We estimate a two-stage instrumental variables model, instrumenting payment with a variable correlated with child support enforcement. We find that increasing the likelihood of paying child support results in greater father-child contact among nonresident fathers in household surveys. Thus, child support enforcement appears to be having a positive impact on visitation among these fathers.