The Economics of Child Custody

The Economics of Child Custody

I develop a model of marriage in which spouses decide on investments in child quality during marriage, and on the allocation of child custody should they divorce. The custodial allocation determines the share of the marital surplus each spouse appropriates, which in turn influences spouses’ investment incentives. The custodial allocation therefore has both distributional and efficiency conseque...

Child Custody: Mediation

Disputed child custody is a significant life stressor for both adults and children. Recent efforts have been made to develop a model for family mediation and subsequent clinical strategies that can attempt to address the stressors involved in divorce and perhaps resolve, through mediation, the posttrauma stress experienced by both spouses and children. Reviewed is the literature on the impact o...

An Economic Model of Child Custody

This paper develops a model of child custody based on an incomplete-contract approach to the allocation of property rights. Because of the presence of transaction costs in marriage, altruistic parents cannot contract upon the investments they make into their children, but can reduce the resulting inefficiencies by determining ex ante the parent who would be allocated custody in case they divorc...

Child Custody Challenges for Divorced Mothers: A Phenomenological Study

Introduction: The divorce is a public health issue in the family and society; that has irreparable damage to family members, especially children. One of the prominent issues in divorce is child custody. Due to the pivotal role of emotions and feeling in women, in the present study, the attention is devoted to the psychological challenges of divorcing women over acquiring the rights of custody o...

Can joint custody serve the best interests of the child?