Research

Do financial contributions from non-resident parents improve outcomes for separated children? Evidence from the UK child maintenance system.

supervised by Ian Walker, Maria Navarro Paniagua and Vincent O'Sullivan

This paper provides UK evidence on the extent to which child maintenance payments (commonly referred to as child support in the US) affects child behavioural and social outcomes. Evidence from the US suggests that child support can mitigate some of the adverse effects of separation, although many of these studies suffer from bias associated with non-random selection into child maintenance. Using Understanding Society, a rich and recent longitudinal dataset, and fixed effect modelling to account for unobserved heterogeneity, we find receiving child maintenance is associated with a reduction in youth conduct problems by 12 percent of a standard deviation. Our findings are robust to the Oster (2019) test, supporting our suggestion that the result is not (at least, not entirely) driven by selection on unobservables. This effect controls for non-resident father characteristics which suggests that new family dynamics are likely to be important omitted variables in other research.

Welfare conditionality and lone parents: quasi-experimental evidence from the UK Lone Parent Obligation reform

In 2012 the UK government enacted the final phase of the Lone Parent Obligation reform, which imposed work search requirements for lone parents with a youngest child aged 5 or 6. This paper provides causal evidence to evaluate the effect of this reform on lone mother’s welfare receipt and employment outcomes. Using a difference-in-difference approach, I find that maternal employment increases by 8 percentage points, and work search activity increases by 9 percentage points, relative to the control group of married mothers. These effect sizes are similar in magnitude to those found for previous phases of the LPO on lone mothers’ employment and the introduction of the WFTC. The results are very similar across two datasets and are robust to several sensitivity checks, which add credibility to the estimates. Event study results indicate that the employment effects happen around five quarters post-reform whilst work search activity increases are concentrated in the quarters immediately after the reform.