This paper addresses the question: Does joint legal custody increase child support payments? It describes differences in formal child support payments for those with and without joint legal custody among divorce cases. It examines legal custody differences in the short-term after divorce as well as in the intermediate term, through the sixth year after divorce, to assess whether any economic benefits of joint legal custody endure through a significant part of childhood.

To the extent that legal custody differences in payments exist, we ask whether family and case characteristics, such as parents' incomes, number of children, and amount of child support orders

account for these differences. Finally, the paper uses statistical methods that adjust for the fact that unmeasured characteristics may affect both the adoption of joint legal custody as well as higher child support payments. Ignoring these unmeasured differences may overstate the benefits of joint legal

custody for child support payments. The paper aims to provide a less biased estimate of the effects of joint legal custody on child support payments than is available from most previous studies.

We use data from Indonesia and a demographic modeling strategy to estimate the total effect of increasing women’s schooling for the schooling of the next generation. This approach differs from standard approaches in that we include an estimate of how changes in women’s schooling affect children’s schooling not only directly but also through women’s choice of mate, marriage timing, fertility timing, fertility levels and the mortality of women and children. Each of these demographic factors can affect the relative number of children who will achieve different levels of schooling in the subsequent generation as a result of increasing women’s schooling in the previous generation. Some mechanisms, such as assortative mating, have very strong positive effects while others, such as marriage timing and fertility levels have offsetting effects. Differential mortality has a positive effect. Our results also demonstrate that the effects of expansions in women’s schooling depend on both the starting distribution of women’s schooling and where in the distribution women’s schooling increases.