Reflections on state of the school

Our reception for alumni and

friends in February drew 100 guests de-spite a severe win-ter storm blowing through Madison. We were pleased so many of you could attend.

I thought I would use this space to share with all our alum-ni and friends a few

thoughts from my welcoming remarks. The school’s national reputation is

strong and improving: the latest U.S. News Ranking placed us 12th in the nation, and we were third in social policy and ninth in health policy. We are pleased because we are one of the smallest schools and certainly are the smallest of the top ranked schools. We

Spring 2013 / www.lafollette.wisc.edu

La Follette NotesNews for Alumni & Friends of The Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison

From the Director Tom DeLeire

See Reschovsky on page 6

Homecoming welcome for alumFifteen La Follette School alumni were among those who celebrated the return of Andy McGuire, ’09, from a yearlong tour of duty in Afghanistan. McGuire, a program analyst with the Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau, is a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy Reserve. The alumni are, back row from left: Corey Singletary (’10), Justin Martin (’08), Joe Fontaine (’08), Tom Hinds (’09), Andy McGuire (’09), Dan Bush (’09), Jacob Schindler (’10), Tom Robinson (’09), McKinney Austin (’11), Kevin Luecke (’09), Maggie Carden (’09); front row from left: Liz Drilias (’08), Katie Herrem (’08), Lilly Shields (’10) and Megan Stritchko (’09). See page 8 for details.

Students win 1st place at policy competition

Reschovsky to retire, continue tax policy research Andrew Reschovsky has spent his career

exploring how tax policies affect indi-viduals and the various ways in which state and local governments are financed.

Although the government finance expert is retiring from the University of Wiscon-sin–Madison, his research schedule remains full, with further exploration of the fiscal health of central cities in the United States and plans for a conference and journal issue on school finance.

Reschovsky’s work spans several themes, including city finance, intergovernmental fis-cal relations, and tax policy. His recent schol-arship has appeared in a number of academic journals, including the National Tax Journal, Regional Science and Urban Economics, Public

A team of five La Follette School stu- dents won first place in a nation-

al public affairs national competition in Washington, D.C., March 22-23.

Miriam Palmer, Selina Eadie, Andrew Walsh, Norma-Jean Simon and Jiaqi Lu won the Policy Solutions Challenge USA. They won the Midwest regional competition held March 1-2 at Ohio State University.

The five presented their strategies for combating childhood obesity, using policy and cost-benefit analysis to support their recommendations, according to their fac-ulty adviser, David Weimer.

“I am very proud of the hard work and preparation the students put into this ex-ercise,” Weimer says. “Their success says

much about their ability as well as the talent the La Follette School attracts.”

The contestants say they appreciate that gifts to the La Follette School from alumni and friends helped defray the stu-dents’ travel expenses. In addition, alumni Lindsay Read (’09) and Carissa DeCramer (’08) provided housing for three students, and 2012 alumni Katherine Sydor, Linda Collins and Andrew Peppard cheered on the Fightin’ Bobs at the competition.

The team from the University of Ar-kansas’ Clinton School of Public Service took second place, and the team from Brown University’s Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions won third place. wSee Director on page 7

2 / La Follette Notes www.lafollette.wisc.edu Spring 2013

organizations, includ-ing the Ruffed Grouse Society, Dane County Conservation League, the Nature Conservan-cy, Southwest Wiscon-sin Chapter of Trout Unlimited, the Prairie Enthusiasts. He served as chairman of the Pre-scribed Fire Council of Wisconsin.

Presser also was a union steward for the Wisconsin Science Professionals. He was an active member of his church, Circle Sanctuary of Mount Horeb, and he led conservation efforts on the nature preserve there. He enjoyed making music and was a member of the Madison-based Brazilian percussion group “The Handphibians” for several years.

Survivors include his wife of 25 years, Laurie Larson, and their two children, Hunter and Allegra Larson, all of Madison.

He was beloved by many for his humor and full-hearted generosity. To his last day, he lived his life fully. w

Memorial services for 1995 alum Dennis W. Presser were held Febru-

ary 23 in Madison. Presser, 54, passed away suddenly from natural causes at his home in Madison on February 16.

A memorial service for professor emeritus Donald Nichols was held March 16

in Madison. Nichols, whose tenure lead-ing the La Follette School of Public Affairs helped shape Wisconsin’s economic devel-opment, died February 15 at age 72.

A professor emeritus of economics and public affairs at the University of Wis-consin–Madison, Nichols was La Follette School director from 2002 to 2006.

Nichols served on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers to the U.S. president in 1963 and joined the UW–Madison faculty in 1966. In 1975 and 1976 he served on the staff of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee. In the late 1970s, he was deputy assistant secre-tary of the U.S. Department of Labor.

Nichols loved economics as a discipline and economic policy as a practice. While in Washington, he developed the skill of eco-nomic forecasting, something he practiced in many venues. He had begun his career

as an economic theo-rist, but he was drawn to practical problems of economic policy.

In the 1980s, Nich-ols was an economic adviser to Wisconsin Governor Tony Earl, and he later served on Governor Jim Doyle’s Economic Advisory Council. On campus, he was director of the Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy from 1991 until his retirement in 2006 and director of the Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy from 1994 to 2003. He was a popular teacher and earned several teaching awards. He published numerous professional articles and books.

Nichols remained active in his profes-sion after retirement, serving until his death on the Academic Advisory Board of the

Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Starting in 1987, Nichols was on the original board of Thompson Plumb Funds, and he served as chairman after the financial firm was re-configured. He was widely called upon for advice and to speak at public functions. He was a fellow in the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.

He is survived by his wife of 11 years, Jane Bartels; by his son, Charles of Madi-son, Wisconsin; his daughter, Elizabeth, and his granddaughter, Clare, both of St. Paul, Minnesota; his brothers, Kenneth and Paul, both of Middletown, Connecticut; and his sister, Marcia Stone of Madison, Connecticut. He was preceded in death by two wives, each dying of cancer. He was married to Linda Powley for 20 years and to Barbara Jakubowski for 17 years.

Nichols was happiest in nature in all seasons and in contemplating difficult economic policy problems. Most of all, he loved to laugh with his wife. w

In memoriam

Don Nichols shaped Wisconsin economy, led La Follette School

Donald Nichols

Dennis W. Presser

Presser was an environmental analysis and review specialist with the Bureau of Land and Water Resources of the Wiscon-sin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection. He earlier worked as

an analyst for the Wisconsin Department of Transportation and the State Budget Office.

From 1991-1995, Presser at-tended and graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madi-son with master’s degrees in public administration and urban and re-gional planning. His first job after graduating was as an extension agent for Juneau County.

Presser earned a bachelor’s de-gree in humanities from North Dakota State University. He served his country for more than 20 years as an Army infantryman on active duty and in the National Guard. He retired as a captain from the 32nd Infantry Brigade.

Presser was an avid conserva-tionist, hunter and trout fisher-man. He held active roles in many

Family, friends mourn 1995 alum, conservationist Dennis Presser

Dennis Presser, his wife, Laurie Larson, and their dog, Django, at Theodore Roosevelt National Park in 2011.

Spring 2013 www.lafollette.wisc.edu La Follette Notes / 3

1970s Terry Lierman, 1971, has started a venture capital and consulting company, Summit Global Ventures, after stepping down in late 2011 as chief of staff for U.S. House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland. He also is one of the founders of Global Virus Network, a non-profit organiza-tion that brings together medical virologists from more than 31 countries to track pandemic viruses, educate the public and train virology researchers. He will give the keynote address at this year’s com-mencement of his undergraduate school Winona State University in Minnesota

1980s Kevin R. Hayden, 1984, is now chief execu-tive officer of Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin. Prior to starting that position in 2013, Hayden served as president of WellPoint

State Sponsored Business, where he had national responsibility for the com-pany’s Medicaid managed-care business in 10 states. Hayden earlier was chief administrative officer at Dean Health System, and he served as secretary of the Wisconsin Depart-ment of Health and Family Services in 2006-08.

1990s Brad Kelly, 1993, is now the committee admin-istrator for the Senate Education Committee in the Minnesota Senate.

Bill Cosh, 1993, is communications director of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. Cosh had been the department’s spokesperson. Prior to joining the DNR, he served as the spokes-person for the state Department of Justice and attorney general J.B. Van Hollen. He previously served as a research assistant for state represen-

tative Dan Meyer and as the senior education policy advisor under governor Scott McCallum. Cosh began his career as an assistant in the office of the chancellor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison while he was a graduate student at the La Follette Institute.

News from alumni and friendsMary Carr Lee, 1995, is marketing communications manager of Group Health Cooperative of South Central Wisconsin. Earlier, she supervised all external affairs programming at the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wiscon-sin–Madison. Prior to that, she spent a decade in broadcast journalism, then

held public relations positions at UW Hospital and Clinics and Meriter Health Services. In addition to her master’s degree in public policy and adminis-tration, she has a certificate in health management.

2000s Isaac Eagan, 2011, is helping the nonprofit organization Spirit of America respond to needs identified by American military and civilian person-nel serving around the world for items, support and expertise that will help local people.

Joe Davison, 2009, has been promoted to major with the Wisconsin National Guard. In May he becomes deputy commander of the 54th Civil Support Team, Wisconsin’s full-time response team for emergencies or terrorist events that involve weapons of mass destruction or toxic industrial chemicals. Kevin Hayden

Bill Cosh

2002 alum Hilary (Murrish) Benedict and her husband, Ian, welcomed their first child in January. “Our son, Dillon Reese Benedict, was born on January 16 at 7 pounds 11 ounces, 20.5 inches,” she reports. “We are all doing well and adjusting to life with our little one.” Benedict is a senior analyst with the Government Accountability Office in Denver, Colorado.

w

2009 grads Emily Engel and Jennifer Hassemer announce the birth of their daughter, Willa Susan Hassemer. She was born October 29 and weighed 10 pounds. Hassemer is a public finance attorney at the Dorsey & Whitney law firm in Minneapolis, and Engel is a health and human services executive budget officer with the Minnesota Man-agement and Budget department.

Future Bobs

Share your news

LARGE and small

Send your news or update your records any time by

emailing alumni@lafollette.wisc.edu or calling 608-263-7657

Mary Carr Lee

4 / La Follette Notes www.lafollette.wisc.edu Spring 2013

2012 alum Carly Hood is lead au-

thor on an article in the Wisconsin Medical Journal.

Hood wrote “Pro-moting Healthy Food Consumption: A Re-view of State-Level Policies to Improve Access to Fruits and Vegetables” with Ana Martinez-Donate and Amy Meinen.

They review state-level policy op-

tions recently proposed or implemented across the United States. They provide an evidence-based lens through which food access policy can be shaped in the Midwest.

The review and potential framework uses Wisconsin to illustrate the feasibility of different state-level decisions and their potential impact on particu lar populations. Future supply-side policies to consider in-clude expanding Electronic Benefit Trans-fer to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children program and farmers markets, incentiviz-ing the purchase of locally grown produce,

assisting local specialty farmers directly, and/or establishing a state-level food policy council. The review reveals that a food policy council would create a more sustain-able policy analysis process to better ensure comprehensive policy that encompasses production, distribution and purchase of locally grown fruits and vegetables.

Hood earned master’s degrees in public affairs and public health through the La Follette School’s dual-degree program. She is a post master’s fellow with the Popula-tion Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. w

Health-care reform makes “free and vigorous” advocacy around private

insurance issues available to more Ameri-cans, according to a study coauthored by 2002 alum Sarah Davis, associate director of the Center for Patient Partnerships at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

The reform creates a national commit-ment to such assistance for the very first time, and it provides grants and technical support for state-run consumer assistance programs, Davis and her coauthors note.

After interviewing senior consumer as-sistance program staff around the United States and analyzing grant documents, Davis and coauthors found that advo-

cacy capacity had substantially increased in roughly half the states receiving federal grants, and some progress had been made virtually everywhere.

Their findings are detailed in “The Affordable Care Act’s Plan For Consumer Assistance with Insurance Moves States Forward but Remains a Work in Progress” published in February in the journal Health Affairs. The article is part of a special issue on patient engagement.

Consumer advocacy programs can be underutilized because many consumers are unaware of the resource, Davis says. Most states have consumer assistance programs with staff who can answer questions about

coverage, access and co-pays.

Davis has a dual-degree in law and public policy. She teaches about health advocacy and health law. The Center for Patient Partnerships, an interdisciplinary center of the schools of Law, Medicine and Public Health, Nursing and Pharmacy, of-fers experiential patient advocacy educa-tion to students from those disciplines and others. w

Sarah Davis

Health-care reform expands patient advocacy, alum finds

Recent alum reviews food policy in medical journal

Carly Hood

Students recommended that four municipalities just south of Madison consolidate their fire departments

and emergency medical services. The students conducted the cost-benefit analysis after

Fitchburg mayor Shawn Pfaff, a 2002 La Follette alum, asked his city manager to contact the La Follette School for assistance. The students only considered consolida-tion as an alternative to the current service arrangement.

All members of professor David Weimer’s cost-bene-fit analysis class, the students presented in December to about 75 firefighters, chiefs, paramedics, administrators and other officials for Fitchburg, the town of Madison, village of Oregon and the city of Verona.

“With municipal budgets getting tighter and the de-mand for services getting greater, it is important for local governments to find ways to collaborate to lower costs and improve services,” Pfaff says. “That is why we need-ed La Follette students to provide us with an analytical road map through a detailed cost-benefit analysis.” w

From left: Fitchburg mayor and 2002 La Follette School alum Shawn Pfaff, and students Jimmy Galindo, Angela Waltz, Andrew Kleps, Phil Sletten, Katie Biddick and Bryan Mette who carried out the cost-benefit analysis.

Students share costs, benefits of consolidated fire departments, EMS

Spring 2013 www.lafollette.wisc.edu La Follette Notes / 5

The United States must not scale back its Federal Emergency Management

Agency, professor Donald Moynihan ar-gues in the journal Nature.

A central agency is crucial for disaster response, Moynihan says. “Even as the after-math of Superstorm Sandy demonstrates the importance of federal assistance, the govern-ment is cutting the budget of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s New York office by 5 percent,” Moynihan says. “That cut to FEMA is a false economy. If we do not prepare for the growing threats that FEMA deals with, we will pay more when disaster strikes.”

A paper Moynihan coauthored won the 2013 Joseph Wholey Scholarship

Performance Award from the American Society for Public Administration for outstanding scholarship on performance in public and nonprofit organizations.

Moynihan wrote the paper with Sté-phane Lavertu, an assistant professor at Ohio State University.

The authors published “Does Involve-ment in Performance Reforms Encourage Performance Information Use? Evaluating GPRA and PART” in 2012 in Public Administration Review.

Moynihan and Lavertu found that attempts to improve the performance of federal programs haven’t been as effec-tive as they could be.

They found perfor-mance management reforms in 1993 and 2002 did not affect federal managers’ administrative decisions or their allocation of money, although the changes did result in managers refining program goals. w

The argument that more flexibility in the exchange rate regime speeds up

current account adjustment is not true, recent analysis by economist Menzie Chinn suggests.

Chinn and coauthor Shang-Jin Wei of Columbia University report their findings in an article to be published by the Review of Economics and Statistics.

The exchange rate regime is how a country manages its currency’s value in relation to other currencies. A country’s current account is the difference between the values of imports and exports, plus net income from abroad.

Based on 1971-2005 data for more than 170 countries, Chinn and Wei examine whether the rate of current account rever-sion depends upon the de facto degree of

exchange rate fixity. “We find that there is no strong, robust or monotonic relation-ship between exchange rate regime flexibility and the rate of cur-rent account reversion, even after accounting for the degree of eco-nomic development, the degree of trade and capital account openness,” says Chinn who has been named co-editor of the Journal of International Money and Finance.

The findings are significant because poli cymakers and economic analysts around the world generally assume that if a country’s exchange rate is flexible, then cur-

rent account imbalances will typically be corrected fairly quickly, Chinn says. A cur-rent account deficit occurs when the value of a country’s imports is greater than the combined value of exports and net income from abroad. The current-account deficit is a broader measure than a country’s trade deficit because, in addition to imports and exports, it includes income from assets abroad after payments for liabilities owed to foreigners are subtracted out.

“For example,” Chinn says, “Egypt and China have a relatively rigid exchange rate regimes, meaning they do not adjust the value of their currencies. Yet, Egypt has a relatively fast current account convergence, meaning it rarely has a large and persistent deficit or surplus, but China does not.” w

Efforts to mitigate climate change must target energy efficiency

Public institutions and private investors devote twice as much effort to developing energy supply

technologies—such as new power stations—than on improving the efficiency with which energy is used, a report coauthored by professor Greg Nemet shows.

Published in Nature Climate Change in 2012, the research shows that efficient end-use technologies have the potential to contribute large emission reduc-tions and provide higher social returns on investment —so the imbalance in current innovation efforts must be redressed to mitigate climate change. w

School director Tom DeLeire and professor Barbara Wolfe encouraged President Obama to end the ban on research on the public health ef-

fects of gun violence.They were two of more than 100 scholars who wrote to the president’s

gun violence commission urging more research. “It could be the case that many of the claims or some of the claims made by proponents of gun con-trol are overstated,” DeLeire told Wisconsin Public Radio.

DeLeire sees parallels between gun research and studies of motor ve-hicles that led to safer cars and drivers. “Better research—if one were to believe those things were overstated—better research would show that,” he says. w

Donald Moynihan

Menzie Chinn

Research news

Moynihan urges full FEMA funding, wins award for paper

Chinn’s analysis debunks exchange rate policy tenet

Professors back gun violence study

6 / La Follette Notes www.lafollette.wisc.edu Spring 2013

“These issues keep coming back,” Reschovsky says, noting that one of his spring 2013 Workshop in Public Affairs groups is investigating Wiscon-sin’s policy relating to the taxation of retirement income. “Policy analysts should keep in mind they never write the definitive answers to these issues.”

Formula design—how state and federal policymakers distribute aid to governmen-tal units—is a third element of Reschovsky’s research. His second teaching job took him from Rutgers University to Tufts University in Massa-chusetts. His early years there included incumbent governor Michael Dukakis’ 1979 loss and 1983 re-election.

“Dukakis ran on a platform that included a promise that the state government would provide more state aid to local governments in the wake of the state having passed property tax limits,” Reschovsky says. “The question was how to al-locate the aid. Few scholars were working on state and local public financing, so with three other economists, I helped develop a funding formula that became the basis of how aid was distributed in Massachusetts. We took into account not only property values, but the fact that some municipali-ties operated in more expensive environments—higher population density, concentrations of lower income families—which raises the costs of provid-ing public services, such as public safety and educa-tion. Some local governments need to spend more money to provide any given level of public service, and the factors in the distribution formula should account for these higher costs.”

Reschovsky expanded on that experience and participated in designing state aid distribu-

tion formulas in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Texas and South Africa. “South Africa was decentralizing as it moved away from being a highly centralized state during the apartheid era,” Reschovsky says. “The nation had to figure out how to allocate central government resources to its newly democratized provincial and local governments. I was delighted to play a small part in helping them achieve that goal.”

Reschovsky was a consultant to the national government’s Department of Provincial and Local Government, and he has served as a technical advi-sor to the South African government’s Financial and Fiscal Commission since 1999.

In Wisconsin, one recent analysis provided strong statistical evidence that few elderly home-owners are forced to move from their homes be-cause of rising property taxes. Another study found

Two faculty win campus honorsLa Follette faculty members Menzie Chinn and Susan Yackee have been honored with campus awards.

“These are all well-deserved honors,” says La Follette School director Tom DeLeire. “These awards recognize the high caliber of research that La Follette School faculty carry out, as well as their contributions to improving the design, implementation and evaluation of public policy and the practice of gover-nance worldwide.”

Chinn won the Kellett Mid-Career Award, which recog-nizes outstanding mid-career faculty members who are five to 20 years past the first pro-motion to a tenured position. He is one of 12 professors to each receive a $60,000 flexible research award.

Yackee is one of 11 profes-sors on campus to receive a Romnes fellowship. This award recognizes exceptional faculty members who have earned ten-ure within the last six years. Se-lected by a Graduate School committee, winners receive an unrestricted $50,000 award for research. The award is named for the late H.I. Romnes, former chair-man of the board of AT&T and former president of the WARF board of trustees.

Susan Yackee

Andrew Reschovsky

Finance Review, Education Finance & Policy, Public Budgeting and Finance, Comparative Education Review, and Public Finance and Management.

Reschovsky’s significant contributions to state and local government finance were recognized in 2011 with the Steven D. Gold Award, given by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Manage-ment, the National Conference of State Legisla-tures and the National Tax Association.

Reschovsky will continue to research city finance as he and coauthors expand their analy-sis of the fiscal health of U.S. cities. Reschovsky, Howard Chernick of Hunter College and Adam Langley of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy have constructed what they call “fiscally standard-ized cities.” This calculation, which was described in the fall 2012 La Follette Policy Report, allows the authors to account for all local government rev-enues received by local governments that provide services to city residents and businesses.

“The basic idea is to include all revenues col-lected by a central city municipal government and by that portion of independent school districts, special districts and county governments that over-lay municipal boundaries,” Reschovsky says. “We refer to the result of this calculation as the revenue of a ‘fiscally standardized city government.’”

Reschovsky and his coauthors have data for 109 U.S. cities from 1977 to 2010, and they are adding data from subsequent years as the informa-tion becomes available.

“One of our goals is to use these data to deter-mine the fiscal health of central cities,” Reschovsky says. “More importantly, we want to know why some cities are in particularly weak fiscal health, and which policies and governance structures lead to improved fiscal conditions. We want to identify both good and bad practices.”

Reschovsky first became interested in local financeand intergovernmental relations while a doctoral student in economics at the University of Pennsylvania. For his dissertation on intra-metro-politan residential location and the local public sec-tor, Reschovsky studied the role of local taxes and public spending on households’ residential choices within Minnesota’s Twin Cities metropolitan area.

Exploring the distributional impacts of various public policies is another theme of Rescho-

vsky’s research. He has strived to understand how policies affect different individuals and how best to measure these effects. He looked at the effects of Proposition 13, California’s 1978 constitutional amendment to limit property taxes; taxation of poor people; and taxation of Social Security ben-efits. He also examined the distribution of tax bur-dens from gasoline taxes.

Reschovsky continued from page 1

See Reschovsky on page 7

Spring 2013 www.lafollette.wisc.edu La Follette Notes / 7

that an increase from two to three property tax installment payments each year would reduce the property tax delinquency rate by about a third. Other analyses have focused on aspects of school funding in Wisconsin.

In a 2004 paper discussed at the La Follette School’s January 2005 conference Taxing

and Spending Limits in Wisconsin, Rescho-vsky demonstrated that a proposed amend-ment to Wisconsin’s constitution to limit government spending and taxing authority would lead to reductions in programs that help the state’s most vulnerable residents, a downsizing of the University of Wisconsin System and reductions in school districts’ ability to provide quality education.

Reschovsky also was one of the first analysts to anticipate and project Wiscon-sin’s “structural deficit,” which Reschovsky defines as occurring when the amount of money needed to maintain current public services exceeds the revenue generated by the state’s existing tax system. In a 2002 La Follette School primer, Reschovsky noted the state has had a structural deficit since at least the mid-1990s, and he predicted the state would continue to see annual structur-al deficits through fiscal year 2009–10. The “structural deficit” was much discussed in

Support La Follette School students and programsInformation available online at www.lafollette.wisc.edu/giving

or call 608-263-7657 or email giving@lafollette.wisc.edu

like our size because it allows us to develop close ties with our students in ways that would not be possible with giant cohorts.

One reason for our reputation is the strength of our faculty. As noted elsewhere in this issue, two faculty members won prestigious university awards last fall: Su-san Yackee and Menzie Chinn. This adds to the awards received in recent years by David Weimer, Don Moynihan, Melanie Manion and others. In this regard, we are one of the most highly decorated units on campus, despite our small size, and we are quite proud of that status.

In other areas our job placements are ex-cellent and improving. Despite a challenging economy and tight budgets, La Follette stu-dents are in high demand, no doubt because of their great inherent talents as well as the training they receive—and valuable advice from many of our alumni and friends.

The number of applications to our pro-gram continues to grow year after year.

Another reason for our positive reputa-tion is the backing by our alumni. I thank our many alumni and friends for their sup-port of the La Follette School. You can and do help us in many ways: by hosting stu-dents as interns, by hiring our graduates, and by mentoring students or recent grad-uates. These are all terrific ways in which you directly help our students, the school, and the university—thank you.

Another important way in which you can help the La Follette School is through alumni giving. In any given year, we re-ceive support from almost 5 percent of our alumni, meaning 95 percent of our alumni don’t support the school financially. I en-courage you to make a gift and to encour-age your classmates to do so. Donations from alumni and friends are used to di-rectly support current La Follette students through scholarships and through student programming. Schools of public affairs rely on their alumni to “give back” in order to continue their missions of training lead-ers in public and non-profit sectors.

I hope you will join your classmates in strengthening the La Follette School and its support for students and programs. w

Andrew Reschovsky has trained many La Fol-lette School alumni in the intricacies of state and local government finance, government finance in developing countries and microeconomic policy analysis.

Most recently, the course in state and local public finance has been his favorite to teach. “Recent events in Wisconsin and in other state capitals, coupled with funding cutbacks at the federal level, have led students to the realization that the action is now at the state and local level,” says Reschovsky.

As an instructor for the workshop in public af-fairs, Reschovsky has guided teams of domestic and international public affairs students as they conducted research and policy analysis for real-world clients that include the city of Milwaukee; the Wisconsin Legislative Council; the Wisconsin

departments of Revenue and Health Services; and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris.

“The public affairs workshop lets graduate stu-dents at La Follette improve their policy analysis skills while they contribute to the capacity of the collaborating agency to provide services,” Reschovsky says.

“The best way to learn policy analysis is to do policy analysis,” he adds. “Analysis is central to our discourse about public policies, especially in public finance, a highly contested area as people debate taxes and the appropriate role of govern-ment in our economy. Our students graduate with a strong portfolio of analytic skills and a deep appreciation of the importance of careful analysis in the functioning of governments at all levels.”

Wisconsin during the 2010 governor’s race.Upon retiring in June after 24 years

with the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Reschovsky and his wife, Julia K. Murray, a professor of Chinese art history at UW-Madison, will move to the Boston area, where he plans to continue his research on state and local public finance and on the fiscal health of U.S. cities.

With the support of the Lincoln Insti-tute of Land Policy, in Cambridge, Massa-chusetts, where he has been a visiting fellow since 2007, Reschovsky is organizing a con-ference to examine the role of school prop-erty taxes. “The Property Tax and Financing of K-12 Education” will be held October 18-19 in Cambridge.

Papers presented at the conference and other submissions will be considered for inclusion in a special issue of the journal Education Finance and Policy that Rescho-vsky is co-editing.

The primary objective of the conference and the special issue is to encourage research on the role that the property tax or alterna-tive local government revenue sources play in funding public education, Reschovsky says. “A major focus will be the fiscal behav-ior of local school districts in an environ-ment of declining or, at best, stable state and federal intergovernmental revenues.” w

Director continued from page 1

Reschovsky continued from page 6

Reschovsky helps students sharpen analysis skills

8 / La Follette Notes www.lafollette.wisc.edu Spring 2013

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action educator and employer. We promote excellence through diversity in all programs.

More than 70 friends, fam-

ily, and colleagues, in-cluding 15 La Follette School alumni, gathered to celebrate the return of Andy McGuire, ’09, from a yearlong tour of duty in Afghanistan.

McGuire, a program analyst with the Wis-consin Legislative Audit Bureau, is a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy Reserve. He was called up to serve with a joint intelligence unit at Bagram Air Base.

The party, held in March in Madison, was thrown by The OMG Club, a group of “old married guys” who became friends while studying at La Follette.

McGuire is returning to his position at

Friends welcome alum home from Afghanistan

Laura and Andy McGuire at the welcome home party in Madison. See page 1 for photo of alumni at party.

Save the datesIf you will be in Madison,

please join us

wThursday, July 11, 2013, for the Hill Fest evening picnic on the La Follette School grounds, 5-7 p.m.

w Thursday, February 6, 2014, for the annual reception at Inn on the Park, 4:30-7 p.m.

the Audit Bureau and rejoining his Chica-go-based reserve unit, but not before enjoy-ing a spring break trip to Hawaii with his wife, Laura. w