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Child support order: how do judges decide without guidelines? Evidence from France

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Abstract

The paper presents a model of family judges’ child support orders when no guidelines are available. Based on the French case, it argues that judges weigh up their wish to comply with their institutional environment against their discretion and their willingness to find a compromise, by basing their decision on the parties’ average offer. Using experimental data consisting of child support awards set by approximately 80 French judges, the findings of the paper suggest that family judges promote parents’ child support offer when there is an agreement between them, particularly when their offer is lower than the amount deemed necessary to preserve the child’s interest. There is also some evidence that female judges are likely to be more generous than male judges, although in small amounts and under certain circumstances.

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Notes

  1. The magnitude of the increase in divorce rates in France is similar to that of European Union countries (http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Marriage_and_divorce_statistics/fr).

  2. Skinner’s study, which is a replication of the comparative study undertaken by Corden (1999), covers 14 countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom and the USA.

  3. The agency group is made up of: the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Norway and Denmark.

  4. These six countries are: Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, The Netherlands and Sweden.

  5. These three countries are: Austria, Canada (Ontario) and USA (Wisconsin).

  6. Since April 2010, an indicative guideline has been published by the French Ministry of Justice.

  7. The parents do not reach an agreement on the child support in one divorce out of ten, while in judicial procedures involving unmarried parents, there is disagreement in four cases out of ten (Chaussebourg and Baux 2007).

  8. This amount concerns children for whom a sole-custody arrangement is in place and the custodial parent is the mother, which is the most frequent custody arrangement (77 % in 2007) (Chaussebourg et al. 2009).

  9. “When people confront risky decisions—such as deciding whether to settle a case or to proceed to trail—they categorize their decision options as potential gains or losses from some salient reference point like the status quo” (Guthrie et al. 2009: 32).

  10.  « Perhaps disputants are not trying to maximize their expected outcome, but only trying to achieve a fair outcome. However, what each side views as fair tends to be biased by self-interest, reducing the prospects for settlement ». p. 1342.

  11. This could be the case particularly when one of the parties, generally the custodial parent, makes an extremely high offer and the noncustodial parent, a very low offer.

  12. Some studies suggest that the JAF would be inclined to approve an amount agreed by parents due to the mass of divorces cases they have to deal with (Bessière et al. 2011).

  13. An example of a form is presented in Appendix 3.

  14. Quite similar surveys have been conducted among American people, respondents being asked for the child support amounts they would recommend in various parental income situations (Shaeffer 1990; Bergman and Wechtler 1995; Ellman et al. 2009).

  15. These 32 vignettes are presented synthetically in a table in Appendix 2.

  16. The Ministry of Justice does not provide for national statistics about the JAF population’s characteristics (age, gender, experience…). It is therefore not possible to weight our sample to make it representative.

  17. We explored an alternative hypothesis according to which the judge sets a global child support, i.e., for all the children involved, paying attention to the contributive capacities of the debtor. We decided not to use this approach for two reasons. The first is the absence, as far as we know, of software to assess simultaneous equations in the framework of multilevel models. Second, and above all, is the lack for modelization of observations with families of two or more children. For more details on the limits of this approach, see Appendix 11 of Bourreau-Dubois et al. 2003.

  18. If the parents did reach an agreement on the child support amount during the divorce procedure, the judicial decision mentions that the parents’ respective offers are similar. If they did not reach an agreement, the decision indicates the offers made by each parent.

  19. By Zj, we denote, here and later, the explanatory variables of Level-2 (here, the characteristics of the judge level), while the explanatory variables of Level-1 (here the characteristics of the child level) are denoted by the letter Xij.

  20. Following Kreft and De Leeuw’s advice (1998, p. 137), we have centered the PP and AO variables, using the averages calculated at judge level for each of the four cases. This methodological choice is justified by the fact that such a specification makes it possible to reduce multicollinearity, multicollinearity being especially important in the case of multilevel models due to the existence of crossed variables reflecting the interaction phenomena between two levels.

  21. These estimates are first calculated using an unstructured specification, which allows all three parameters to be determined by the data. If the variances-covariances matrix of the random coefficients’ error terms turns out not to be positive definite, we shift to a variance components specification, which imposes null values on the covariances, keeping all three coefficients random.

  22. In fact our model is made up of three variables of Level 2: the judge’s gender and the average values of PP and AO, calculated at judge level (cf. note 20).

  23. Table 3 does not provide all the results of the multilevel models but focuses on the key results.

  24. cf. Appendix 1 for between models and within models comparisons of regression coefficients.

  25. The 0.80 coefficient displayed in case 3 is not significantly different from the 0.73 coefficient displayed in case 1.

  26. The difference is significant (p < 0.001).

  27. These results, not presented in Table 3, are available from the authors upon request.

  28. In case 1, the random intercept of the model is also explained by the average value of PM, calculated at the judge-level.

  29. The guideline can be downloaded from http://www.justice.gouv.fr/art_pix/table_pa_20100715.pdf.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université de Lorraine, BETA (UMR 7522/CNRS/Université de Lorraine/Université de Strasbourg), Lorraine, France

    Cécile Bourreau-Dubois, Myriam Doriat-Duban & Jean-Claude Ray

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  1. Cécile Bourreau-Dubois
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  2. Myriam Doriat-Duban
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  3. Jean-Claude Ray
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Correspondence to Myriam Doriat-Duban.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 5.

Table 5 Between models and within models comparisons of regression coefficients
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Appendix 2

See Table 6.

Table 6 Description of the 32 vignettes
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Appendix 3 Example of vignette submitted to the JAF

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Bourreau-Dubois, C., Doriat-Duban, M. & Ray, JC. Child support order: how do judges decide without guidelines? Evidence from France. Eur J Law Econ 38, 431–452 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10657-012-9368-6

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