The Potential of the Child Support Enforcement Program to Avoid Costs to Public Programs: A Review and Synthesis of the Literature
April 2000
US Department of Health and Human Services
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services contracted with The Lewin Group and Johns Hopkins University to synthesize the literature on child support cost avoidance and to identify areas where additional research is required. The major components of this report are a synthesis of the literature on cost avoidance and an annotated bibliography of cost avoidance studies and related studies that contribute to the methodology of measuring cost avoidance -- e.g., studies on compliance, child support review and adjustment efforts, the behavioral implications of child support policies, microsimulation models and their current and future capacity to estimate cost avoidance, and the use of administrative data to measure cost avoidance. The report also contains a summary of additional research that is needed and recommendations about the most promising strategies for expanding our knowledge about cost avoidance.