The Effect of the Child Support Performance and Incentive Act of 1998 on Rewarded and Unrewarded Performance Goals

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of the Child Support Performance and Incentive Act (CSPIA) of 1998 on child support enforcement goals that are rewarded financially as well as outcomes that are not rewarded. I am able to reconstruct three of the five performance measures explicitly rewarded by CSPIA as well as two of the five measures which were considered for financial rewards, but were ultimately rejected and are not rewarded. Using a panel interrupted time-series model with state fixed effects and state-specific trends, this paper finds that CSPIA had a modest positive impact on two rewarded performance goals-current support and cost-effectiveness. CSPIA also negatively impacted an unrewarded child support outcome-collections sent to other states. This suggests that CSPIA had an ambiguous impact on child support performance, on balance. These results provide more evidence to the ongoing policy debate about the ability of performance systems to improve government performance. It also suggests that reforming performance systems in response to perceived problems ("second-generation" performance systems) may create new gaming responses.