Séparation parentale avant les quatre ans de l’enfant ELFE et complétude de la mise en œuvre de l’obligation alimentaire par le parent débiteur

Non-payment of child support following parental separation is an extremely well-studied research topic in the United States, much less so in France. In the first part of the paper, in addition to the identification of statistics that allow us to account for the extent of this non-payment or partial payment behavior, we conduct a vast review of the empirical socio-economic literature - essentially American - that allows us to identify the main causes of this behavior. We address the question of the debtor's ability to pay and his relative ability to pay, and then the question of his willingness to pay. The latter is studied, on the one hand, from the point of view of the debtor's commitment to the child (intensity of contact, modes of accommodation, factors that may influence the quality of the relationship) and on the other hand, from the point of view of the quality of the relationship between the two parents. The second part is devoted to the identification of parental breakdowns in the ELFE survey. It shows in particular that it is sometimes difficult to identify with certainty certain break-ups, especially when the couple's relationship is initially unclear. We estimate that before the child's fourth birthday, the rate of parental breakdown (low estimate) would be between 8.5% and 9.4%. In the third part, we analyze a survey module specifically addressed to separated parents and dealing mainly with the enforcement of child support obligations. Of the subsample of parents who responded to this module, we estimate that slightly less than two out of three couples have taken steps to implement this support obligation in monetary form, either by initiating divorce proceedings, initiating legal proceedings to determine child support from unmarried parents, reaching an amicable agreement, or actually making voluntary monetary payments. The main findings of our econometric analysis are that the probability of a transfer being scheduled is significantly lower when the debtor father has low income, when the father has little or no contact with the child, when the duration of the separation is short, and when the parents have no or strained relationships. These four results support the ability and willingness-to-pay hypotheses. Among these couples who have provided for a transfer, we estimate that in about six cases out of ten the child support obligation is implemented correctly (completeness and regularity), in two cases out of ten it is imperfectly implemented and in also two cases out of ten it is never implemented. The econometric analysis of this non-payment or partial payment behavior showed that the probability of the transfer being correctly paid was mainly negatively related to the lack of contact between father and child and positively related to the quality of the relationship within the parental couple and the climate of cooperation in the event of divorce. In contrast, the relative ability-to-pay hypothesis is negated in our sample and the absolute ability-to-pay hypothesis receives limited support in our final estimate.