News: Research

The La Follette School of Public Affairs and Department of Political Science at UW–Madison along with the Wisconsin Alumni Association (WAA) are hosting a series of Real Town Hall events in preparation for the 2018 midterm elections.  

La Follette School Professor Jason Fletcher and four UW–Madison colleagues received a five-year, $2 million grant from the National Institute on Aging (NIA). Fletcher, who also serves as director of UW–Madison’s Center for Demography of Health and Aging, is leading the project with Emeritus Professor Alberto Palloni of the Department of Sociology.

An article in the July 26 edition of The Economist referenced a paper written by La Follette School Professor Menzie Chinn and Kavan Kucko (MIPA ’08). The article discussed how the yield curve for government bonds inverted just before each of the most recent U.S. recessions.

Emilia Tjernström, an assistant professor at the La Follette School, and colleagues used a 2012 cyclone in Fiji as a natural experiment to identify the impact of direct exposure to natural hazards on Fijian households’ risk attitudes and subjective expectations about future natural disasters.

A diverse group of more than 30 state lawmakers, legislative staff members, legislative service agency analysts, and staff from the Governor’s office attended the second Office Hours at the Capitol – presented by the Wisconsin Family Impact Seminars and the La Follette School – on Wednesday, May 16.

La Follette School Associate Professor J. Michael Collins and former La Follette School Associate Director Hilary Shager (MPA ’05, PhD ’12) are among the leaders of the Alliance for the American Dream: DreamUp Wisconsin, a new community-university collaboration aimed at promoting shared prosperity and increasing American competitiveness.

In light of concerns about Social Security’s costs and benefit adequacy, La Follette School Professors Tim Smeeding and Pam Herd along with colleagues at The Urban Institute and Syracuse University propose an effective and relatively inexpensive targeted program to provide a minimally adequate income floor to old-age income through the Social Security system.

The Academy of Management’s Public and Nonprofit Division selected a study co-authored by La Follette School Director and Professor Don Moynihan as the best article published in 2017.

The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) selected Assistant Professor Rourke O’Brien to present his paper about the impact of FICO score knowledge on financial behavior.

Thanks to technological advances, researchers know more about the human microbiome, a person’s genetic makeup, and the human brain than anyone could have imagined decades earlier. This knowledge brings with it great potential but also challenges for policy.