“…In contrast, the prevalence of father custody remained stagnant in one study that uses regional data (Maccoby et al, 1988); this is similar to the national proportion of cases with father sole custody, around 12% between the 1980s and 1990s (Huang et al, 2003 particularly the nonresident parent's education, represent the human capital that could allow better decision making for the child. Therefore, empirical studies generally support the positive associations between income, education or age, and joint legal custody, either in univariate comparisons or multivariate regressions (Arditti, 1992;Huang et al, 2003;Koel et al, 1988;Phear, Beck, Hauser, Clark, & Whitney, 1983;Seltzer, 1990Seltzer, , 1991Seltzer, , 1998. Given the same family income, joint legal custody is theoretically affected by the parent's relative income (measured by each parent's income divided by the couple's total income).…”