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Robert M. La Follette
School of Public Affairs
1225 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706
Telephone: 608.262.3581
Fax: 608.265.3233
Last updated:
August 18, 2011
© Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
Alumni and Friends: La Follette Notes: Fall 2008
News from faculty
Pamela Herd won a $30,000 Rockefeller Foundation Innovation Award to Strengthen Social Security for Vulnerable Groups. She will use the award to develop a proposal to improve Social Security benefits for older low-income women who raised children. “Many women end up poor in old age, in part, due to the time and energy they devoted to raising children as opposed to participating in paid labor,” Herd says. “Most other countries reward women for this work. The U.S. does not do so.” The National Academy of Social Insurance selected her.
A journal edited by director Carolyn Heinrich reclaimed the No. 1 ranking for 2007, based on its citation impact factor. The Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory saw an increase in its citation impact factor from 2006 to 2007. The impact rating measures the number of times authors cited articles from the journal within the past two years, adjusted for the number of articles published. Citations of published research are key indicators of the influence of scholarly work. The rankings are compiled by Thomson ISI Web of Knowledge’s Journal Citation Reports database.
Susan Webb Yackee won the Paul Volcker Endowment Junior Scholar Research Grant from the American Political Science Association's Public Administration Section. The $3,000 award will support her research project “Does Political Accountability Lead to Regulatory Delay? An Empirical Assessment of Federal Agency Rulemaking.”
Andrew Reschovsky is back in Madison after spending the 2007-08 academic year as a visiting fellow with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Former director Barbara Wolfe is using her Guggenheim fellowship to conduct two projects on the relationship between income and health. “The evidence clearly shows that persons with higher incomes have better health,” Wolfe says. “What is less clear is the extent to which disparities in income cause differences in health and vice versa. We also need to better understand the underlying causes of these disparities.” One project examines how increased income for American Indians whose tribes operate casinos affects their health and use of health care. The other uses a new data set of multiple brain scans of children coupled to data on income, family status and school performance.
Wolfe and Bob Haveman participated in two conferences at the end of August. The first, the meetings of the International Institute of Public Finance (of which Haveman is a past president), focused on demography and pensions. These meetings were at the university in Maastricht, The Netherlands. The second conference, the meetings of the International Association on Research in Income and Wealth, was in Portoroz, Slovenia.
Paul Soglin is bringing his experience in the public and private sectors to the La Follette School this fall by teaching the public management course as an adjunct associate professor. Soglin served as Madison's mayor from 1973-79 and 1989-97. He taught public finance, public management and public personnel practices for the La Follette School from 1997-2002. He spent several years with health-care software developer Epic Systems, leading the move of the company's 2,600 employees to its new corporate campus in Verona outside of Madison.
Gregory Nemet has been awarded a $100,000 multiyear grant from the Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Nemet is working on a three-year collaborative research project called “Governing New Conflicts in Global Energy Futures” with University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty in several other departments. Nemet presented research on modeling the impacts of government action on low carbon energy technologies at the International Energy Agency in Paris and at the Santa Fe Institute. In June, he participated in a two-week Fulbright seminar in Berlin and Brussels studying how science is used to inform public policy on climate change, food safety and stem cells in Germany and in the European Union.
Associate Director Menzie Chinn gave two papers at four conferences in May and June. One is a new paper on business cycles and exchange rates, presented in June at the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena conference on “The Impact of Global Financial Imbalances” in Siena, Italy, and at the Reinventing Bretton Woods/ Austrian National Bank conference “Global Markets Disruptions: Will Global Imbalances Unwind?” in Salzburg, Austria. He gave a paper on the misalignment of China’s renminbi at the Brookings Institution's Global Economy and Development program and at the Deutsche Bundesbank/Center for Financial Studies-Goethe University Frankfurt workshop on “Panel Methods and Open Economies.”