The Performance of Performance Standards

Estimating treatment effects for discrete outcomes when responses to treatment vary: an application to Norwegian vocational rehabilitation programs

“…A variety of definitions of cream-skimming exist in the literature (see Heckman et al, 2002). For example, in some studies cream-skimming is said to occur when program administrators systematically admit persons who would likely have high employment rates and earnings even in the absence of the program (see, e.g., Bassi, 1983;Anderson et al, 1993).…”

Impact of the Child Support Performance and Incentive Act on child support order establishment

“…We follow much of the logic of the cream-skimming mode found in Heckman, Heinrich, and Smith (2002) and parking model in Koning and Heinrich (2013) though we describe the incentive effect rather than employ formal modeling. Prior to enactment of CSPIA, we presume that child support officials were seeking to maximize the net present value of performance incentive payments, which meant increasing the cost-effectiveness ratio.…”

Curbing cream-skimming: Evidence on enrolment incentives

“…6 Performance incentives stimulate agency efforts to produce value added, but they may also change the population served. This problem has emerged with incentive schemes in education that measure school performance using standardized test scores (Haney, 2000;Jacob, 2005), in job training that evaluate performance using labor market outcomes of trainees (Heckman et al, 2002;Finn, 2009), in German health insurance markets (Buchner and Wasem, 2003) and in health care where doctors, hospitals, and nursing homes are evaluated using "report cards" (Dranove et al, 2003;Bevan and Hood, 2006;Mukamel et al, 2009).…”