Little attention has been devoted to the impact of reputational concerns on public agency outputs. Does an agency’s sensitivity to such concerns vary based on objective performance? We use the valence of press coverage of an agency as a dynamic measure of its reputation in order to provide answers to these questions. We rely on a unique dataset of outputs produced by Centerlink ─ the main service delivery agency for the Australian Government in the field of social policy and administration ─ as part of its fight against social benefits fraud over the period 2000-2010, combined with a quantitative content analysis of press coverage and a survey of the agency’s senior officials. As media coverage of the agency becomes more negative, the agency increases organizational outputs, but only following years of high media coverage, yet the agency’s sensitivity to reputational threats increases when its objective output level is below average.
