La Follette celebrated a decade of its impactful Herb Kohl Public Service Research Competition this year with four innovative and diverse projects that could yield significant policy-relevant research and outreach.
The Wisconsin Retirement Security Index
The Wisconsin Retirement Security Index aims to assess how well people in Wisconsin are prepared for retirement, if seniors in the state are struggling, and if workers are preparing adequately for their retirement years. To create the index, Professor J. Michael Collins will develop a survey of how Wisconsinites are preparing for retirement or how they are currently faring in retirement. Data collection will take place in September 2026 with a planned release in either late fall or early winter. The release will include an event in Madison to bring together state policymakers, agencies, and advocates. This inaugural index will serve as a launching pad for an annual survey and data release each fall, drawing attention to retirement security issues in the state for policymakers, practitioners and private sector leaders.
“The costs of health care and housing are rising faster than incomes, making retirement security harder to come by. The more older people need financial support from younger generations, the more stress all families in Wisconsin will face,” Collins said.
Assessing the impact of the transition to green jobs in vulnerable areas
This project led by Assistant Professor Morgan Edwards aims to model policies for a more just transition and assess the feasibility of strategic job creation in vulnerable regions in Wisconsin and nationwide. Edwards and her partner on the project, postdoc fellow Candelaria Bergero, will integrate energy-economic modeling, high-resolution infrastructure mapping, and employment impact analysis to quantify job losses and gains and evaluate the cost effectiveness of targeted job creation programs. Ultimately, Edwards hopes to provide a detailed understanding of where jobs are being gained and lost, highlighting how policies might enable many of the fastest-growing clean energy industries to emerge in Wisconsin and other regions that have traditionally relied on fossil fuels. Additionally, the research will provide a roadmap for policies that mitigate economic disruptions while maximizing benefits, ensuring that clean energy investments translate into lasting public support.
“The U.S. could create 900,000 new clean energy jobs per year over the next decade. This may lead to more acute job losses in some regions, which could potentially undermine public support for the energy transition,” Bergero said.
“We hope this research can inform efforts focused on preventing these unintended consequences and help achieve a just and equitable energy future,” Edwards added.
Advancing our understanding of the connection between in-utero exposures, health and aging
With this project, Associate Professor Lauren Schmitz seeks to deepen our understanding of how prenatal and early childhood exposures relate to health and aging outcomes by leveraging UW-Madison’s partnership with the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene’s (WSLH) Newborn Screening (NBS) Program. Schmitz will work with WSLH to explore the feasibility of using the NBS Program as an entry point to establish a representative, biosocial study of newborns in Wisconsin. Each year, more than 60,000 newborn heel pricks are screened for congenital and genetic disorders within 24-48 hours of birth at the NBS Laboratory on the UW-Madison campus. Analyzing these epigenetic data would enable Schmitz and her team to connect prenatal exposures to detailed biological markers and postnatal health information across Wisconsin. The planned study will undergo the established review process with parental consent. If successful, it could help develop sensitive predictors of accelerated biological aging at birth that can be linked to policy-relevant aspects of maternal and early-childhood environments. Beyond improving disease prediction in childhood, these data would offer novel insight into the extent to which fetal programming shapes disparities in adult health.
“The idea that later-life health may be linked to epigenetic programming in utero has important implications for early-life policy interventions that could improve age-related morbidity and mortality,” Schmitz said.
Centripetal force in city management hiring
This study by Professor Manny Teodoro will examine how municipal city councilmembers evaluate job candidates for city manager positions when ideological signals are embedded within application materials. It will be an important contribution to Teodoro’s book currently in progress. The study will include a sophisticated survey experiment to test the hypothesis that elected officials, on average, will prefer ideologically moderate candidates over more ideologically extreme ones. Teodoro further expects that this preference for nonpartisan markers in candidates will be strongest when the candidate’s perceived ideology differs from the respondent’s own. That is, conservative officials will be especially averse to liberal job candidates, and liberal officials especially averse to conservative job candidates. These patterns would demonstrate that elected officials themselves exert a moderating force on the composition of the public workforce, reinforcing Teodoro’s broader argument in his book that bureaucratic institutions naturally filter toward centrism.
“The growing distrust of public institutions and the mischaracterization of bureaucrats as partisan actors has become a pressing public policy problem. I hope this research can contribute to a more constructive, evidence-based debate about the role of public servants in Wisconsin and beyond,” Teodoro said.