The Economics of Fatherhood

Abstract

The growth of nonmarital fertility, together with greatly increased divorce rates and an increased proportion of children living in femaleheaded households, has provoked considerable alarm about the demise of the traditional family and concern about potentially harmful effects on the well-being of women and children. In this paper, I briefly summarize recent attempts by myself and others to develop a coherent theoretical framework to integrate economic theories of fertility and marriage in order to better understand why the same men who play the breadwinner role within marriage may fail to support their children following a divorce or who, despite the “gains to marriage,” may prefer to father children out of wedlock rather than within marriage. I argue that such behaviors of men can be understood within a framework that takes into account the selfinterests of both men and women as they interact within a given sexual or marital match and as they interact in a broader “market” for sexual and marriage partners. At the level of a given match, the theory provides hypotheses about the determinants of voluntary child support by fathers who are divorced from or have never married the mother. It also suggests reasons why voluntary child support is likely to be inadequate and, consequently, provides some insight about the role of laws and administrative procedures designed to establish paternity, determine the size of childsupport awards, and enforce collection of awards. At the level of the market, under certain circumstances, theory produces results similar to those emphasized by William Wilson and Katherine Neckerman’s (1987) theory of outof-wedlock childbearing among the underclass.