Can Policy Encourage Fathers to Meet Their Child Support Obligations? Trends, Determinants, and Consequences of Non-Payment in France

Carole Bonnet , Ined
Anne Solaz, INED

Following their parents' separation, children are very likely to fall into poverty. Child support payments are crucial financial resources for parents who have the main custody of the chil-dren. Although often legally mandated (by a family judge) and essential for children’s well-being and development, child support obligations are not systematically fulfilled. To reduce the child support non-payment rate (estimated to be between 20 and 40%), the French gov-ernment established an agency of child support recovery in 2017. This article describes the magnitude of the non-payment over a long period of time, to ex-plain its causes or determinants, as well as the economic consequences for the children and their custodial parent. It also questions to what extend the implementation of the agency has contributed to reduce the non-payment rate. Using longitudinal data of the French version of European EU-SILC survey over fifteen years from 2004 to 2021, we build a panel taking the child as the level of observations, that allows to observe family situation of 31,670 children before and after separation over up to 9 sub-sequent years per child, leading to 106,167 yearly observations. Our results confirm the increasing trend in joint physical custody arrangements, generally not associated to a child support payment. Among the still majority of children in main cus-tody arrangement with their mother, the prevalence of non-payment is decreasing over years, as well as the amount perceived for beneficiaries. There is no turning point in non-payment rate around or after the agency of recovery implementation.

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 Presented in Session 117. Flash Session Families, Policies and Demographic Change