Social scientists who study mortality and the effectiveness of health interventions constantly seek new methodologies to more accurately predict how health interventions may help us to live longer, fuller lives.
La Follette’s Héctor Pifarré i Arolas and Jason Fletcher have this important aim in mind with their 2025 Kohl Competition-winning project. A key measure for health policy and health interventions is often the number of lives saved. However, the metric doesn’t account for the possibility that interventions could temporarily reduce the likelihood of premature death from a cause, such as cancer, while ultimately having a negligible effect on overall longevity, according to Pifarré i Arolas and Fletcher.
“Our project will take initial steps to refine this important measure by focusing on situations where we can better estimate longevity if an initial cause of death was removed,” says Pifarré i Arolas. “We hope this can help our field evaluate health interventions more accurately and lead to better public policy decisions.”
Family Care under Managed Long-Term Services and Supports
A second winning project in the 2025 Kohl Competition, led by Professor Yang Wang, aims to examine the effectiveness of Wisconsin’s Family Care program in increasing the utilization of home-and-community-based services and enhancing care quality among older adults.
Family Care is Wisconsin’s largest program that supports the state’s older adults to live with dignity and a high quality of life through care in nursing facilities or at home. Over the past two decades, Wisconsin has shifted toward Managed Long-Term Services and Supports (MLTSS) programs, which contract with managed care organizations to deliver long-term services and supports.
“Despite the widespread adoption of MLTSS programs, we have limited understanding of whether these programs successfully expand access to the services that are so critical to our aging population,” Wang says. “We also don’t know if this newer model reduces reliance on costly institutional care or serves Wisconsinites in an equitable manner across different racial groups and individuals with complex conditions such as dementia.”
Yang’s research will use a quasi-experimental design taking advantage of the staggered rollout of Family Care across Wisconsin counties from 2000 to 2023 to study these important questions.
Are property taxes progressive or regressive?
Assistant Professor Ross Milton’s Kohl-winning project will investigate how regressive property taxes are, and how that varies between and within U.S. states.
Taxpayers fund state and local governments through a mix of sales taxes, income taxes and property taxes. When considering the best possible mix for their constituents, policymakers should know their relative progressivity or regressivity, which describes whether the tax places a larger (progressive) or smaller (regressive) burden on wealthier households.
“Property taxes primarily fund local governments, but their regressivity has only been studied at the state level. New estimates using modern data will allow estimates of its regressivity at the geographic level where property tax policies are determined,” Milton says.
Milton’s research will provide policymakers with the foundational knowledge to inform tax reforms, improve school finance systems, and evaluate the trade-offs between property, sales, and income taxes.
Nearly a decade of impactful research
The 2025 Herb Kohl Public Research Competition marks the 10th round through this landmark $10 million gift from former U.S. Senator Herb Kohl and his Kohl Initiative. Since 2016, the Kohl Competition has funded numerous groundbreaking research projects that advance equitable, evidence-based policy making.
Recent impactful projects funded by the Kohl Competition include Susan Yackee’s 2024 Main Street Agenda Community Conversations that modeled and studied civil dialogue strategies across the state, and Manny Teodoro’s Wisconsin Waterworks Excellence Project releasing next week with comprehensive, accessible report cards for all 570+ Wisconsin water utilities.