General Overview: CSDE Public Use Data

In 1997 the State of Wisconsin introduced a new public assistance program for low-income families with children, Wisconsin Works (W-2). This program replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). One of the significant differences between the two programs was in the handling of child support money paid on behalf of the children covered under these programs. The Child Support Demonstration Evaluation (CSDE) project was designed as an evaluation of this change.

In Wisconsin, formal child support payments are made to a centralized state agency, the Bureau of Child Support. The Bureau of Child Support receives child support payments, maintains records on the amount owed and the amount paid, and distributes the child support dollars accordingly. Under the AFDC rules, resident parents could receive no more than $50 of all child support paid on behalf of their children, per month; this amount was referred to as the partial "pass-through." The state retained the remainder of any child support paid, in compensation for the cost of the AFDC benefits.

The child support innovation in the W-2 program, starting in the fall of 1997, was to institute a full pass-through of child support money: child support payments made to the Bureau of Child Support on behalf of W-2 families were not to be retained by the state (with some exceptions). The immediate goal of this policy was to increase the likelihood, regularity, and amount of child support payments by nonresident parents on behalf of their children. The longer-range purpose was to strengthen the relationships between children and nonresident parents, and to improve the economic well-being of children.

The CSDE project was designed as an experiment to analyze the effects of the new full pass-through policy. From September 1997 through June, 1999, all W-2 participants were randomly assigned to either the new Experimental group (full pass-through of child support) or to the Control group (partial pass-through of child support, similar to, though more generous than, the old AFDC rules, with a maximum of $50 or 41% of all child support paid, whichever was greater). The first phase of the CSDE project, and the Public Use data made available here, include W-2 cases opened during the 10-month period from September 1997 to July 1998.

Information was collected on both groups of W-2 cases, Experimental and Control, from two major sources:

• Administrative data from the State of Wisconsin on public assistance use and participation, child support payments and receipts, employment and wages, extending from two years prior to W-2 participation until mid-2000
• Parent surveys with W-2 resident mothers and the associated nonresident father of one of their minor children, conducted in 1999 and 2000.

These data have enabled researchers to examine a wide range of effects of the full pass-through policy: child support orders, the level and regularity of formal child support payments and receipts, the frequency and level of informal child support provided by the nonresident parent, the establishment of paternity for nonmarital children, government costs for public assistance programs, mothers' welfare program participation and employment, fathers' employment and income, fathers' contact and interactions with their children, and child well-being.

The data provided for public use are designed to assist other researchers and public policy analysts to continue and expand the analysis of the CSDE data, or to replicate the CSDE findings to the fullest extent possible, while balancing the need to keep the identity of W-2 participants anonymous and individual data strictly confidential. Various methods of protecting the confidentiality of the data have been used: rounding numbers, top-coding extremely high values, aggregating related categories of data, dropping some particularly identifying information, providing data on only partial samples of the participants, and providing access to aggregated summaries of the data through the submission of SAS programs rather than providing individual data records to the user.