Multiple‐Partner Fertility: Incidence and Implications for Child Support Policy

Abstract

This paper is based on a report prepared under Contract C-680 between the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development and the Institute for Research on Poverty. Any views expressed in this report are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the sponsoring institutions. The authors thank Patricia Brown, CSDE Data Manager, and programming staff of the Institute for Research on Poverty for their outstanding programming and construction of the data files used for this analysis. We thank Youseok Choi for excellent Research Assistance, and Dawn Duren and Elizabeth Evanson for assistance in preparing this manuscript.

Testing the Economic Independence Hypothesis: The Effect of an Exogenous Increase in Child Support on Subsequent Marriage and Cohabitation

“…Nonmarital births now constitute more than 40 % of all births (Hamilton et al 2011), and a higher percentage of births are to low-income women, highlighting the importance of understanding partnering transitions for single mothers. Growth in cohabitation (Kennedy and Bumpass 2008) and multiple-partner fertility (e.g., Cancian et al 2011;Meyer et al 2005) have also increased the importance of understanding partnering beyond marriage as well as partnerships with fathers versus other men.…”

Nonresident Fathers and Formal Child Support: Evidence from the CPS, NSFG, and SIPP

“…For instance, research on complex ties across households draws attention to multiplepartner fertility, which has been measured using a variety of methods and data sources. Scholars have relied solely on men's fertility histories (e.g., Guzzo and Furstenberg 2007;Manlove et al 2008), have used reports of fertility histories with data from both men and women (Harknett and Knab 2007;Sinkewicz and Garfinkel 2009;Turney and Carlson 2011), and have merged administrative data on men and women (Meyer, Cancian, and Cook 2005) in order to identify fathers who have had children with multiple women. If the quality of the data on fathers varies across datasets, with some data sources being more likely than others to have identified the most disadvantaged nonresident fathers; then our estimates of other complex family behaviors, such as multiple-partner fertility, and the implications of these behaviors, will be affected as well.…”

Household Position, Parenthood, and Self-reported Adult Health. Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Evidence from the Austrian Generations and Gender Survey

“…Due to changes in traditional family structures, the term stepfamilies, formerly restricted to marriages, has been extended and now includes cohabiting unions with at least one child from a previous union (Bumpass et al 1995). Recently, the terms 'multi-partner fertility' and 'complex families' have been used to describe adults having children with more than one person (Meyer et al 2005;Evenhouse and Reilly 2012;Thomson 2014). Studies on stepfamilies in demography have focused mainly on childbearing and dissolution.…”