Category: UW Experts in the News

Quoted: “There are updates to the tax code all the time,” said Fabio Gaertner, an accounting professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Business who specializes in taxation.

UW Health Clinical Psychologist Dr. Shilagh Mirgain joined NBC15’s Meredith Barack to share advice on how to approach kids with serious, hard-hitting topics.

Quoted: “People between the ages of 15 and 25 tend to be high school kids or young adults in college and there is some concern about this hook-up culture. With that sort of culture there may be less openness in the relationship and willingness among the couple to discuss condoms for STD prevention,” said UW Health OBGYN, Dr. Cynthie Anderson.

Quoted: “The 7th Circuit would rule on that fairly quickly, whether it be on the substance that the court decision was wrong in some way or maybe that the court didn’t have proper authority to release Brendan at this time,” Associate UW-Madison Law Prof. Adam Stevenson said.

Noted: UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden is skeptical that Trump would work arm-in-arm with congressional Republicans in the same way that Walker was able to work with his Legislative majority in Wisconsin.

Quoted: In the end, whatever happens in San Francisco and New York tends to diffuse across the country, but as least some regulations could end up being to Airbnb’s advantage, said Hart Posen, a professor in the business school at the University of Wisconsin.“You need a certain degree of scale to manage that kind of regulations, and that’s a barrier to new companies coming into the field. Once [Airbnb] builds the software to do it, it’s usable in San Francisco and Chicago and everywhere else” he said.

University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Michael Wagner talks about the questions being raised about the Electoral College on Live at Four.

Noted: UW-Madison political science professor Ken Mayer, who is studying the effect of Wisconsin’s voter ID law on election participation, called the number of provisional ballots cast evidence of “hard disenfranchisement” and “many times greater than the number of fraudulent ballots cast through voter impersonation.”

Noted: Donna Friedsam agreed. Friedsam, a policy director at the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, said that prohibiting coverage denials while dropping the coverage mandate could “collapse the individual insurance market” in the United States.

Noted: “It is perceptions, not precise facts, that matter for opinions,” said Kathy Cramer, a UW-Madison political science professor who has studied Wisconsin’s “politics of resentment.”

Quoted: Kathy Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has studied rural America for years. In her book published earlier this year, “The Politics of Resentment,” she writes about the deep well of distrust that people in rural Wisconsin feel toward the major cities in the state. There is a belief that Madison and Milwaukee get all the attention and all the tax dollars. Rural voters feel left behind.

Noted: Some members of the Electoral College — the body that directly elects the president — can choose a candidate different from their state’s popular vote, but in Wisconsin, there is a state law prohibiting that, according to UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden.

Quoted: “Voters see the outcome and think, ‘My vote won’t matter,’” said Barry C. Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “And even if the voter wants his vote to count, it’s still a hassle. You have to take another step that other voters don’t have to.”

Noted: UW-Madison professors Barry Burden, Mike Wagner weigh in.

Quoted: Justin Sydnor, a professor in the business school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, is not quite so sanguine about Obamacare’s near-term future. “Many insurers had put provisions into their contracts for offering ACA-exchange plans  that they could exit the market during the plan year if the federal government stops payments for ’cost-sharing reductions,’” he said. “Because President Trump will have the authority through executive action to end those payments, he could cause an abrupt pullout and cancellation of ACA policies even in January next year. In light of that, what I would say is that there is some real risk of those who buy ACA plans of not being able to get through 2017 without a serious disruption.”

Quoted: “It’s been a long brutal two years, excruciating,” UW-Madison communications expert Mike Flaherty said.Flaherty said the best thing to do to heal those post-election wounds is to stop venting on social media and unplug a bit.

Quoted: “We have never had polls off this substantially across the board,” says UW-Madison Police Science Department Chairman David Canon.

Noted: UW-Madison Political Science Department Chairman David Canon says Trump greatly expanded margins in counties republican candidate Mitt Romney won in 2012, and also flipped a chunk of rural counties from the democratic column in 2012, to his column by sizable amounts.

Quoted: “Trump was an appealing candidate for people who were feeling like rural Wisconsin always gets a raw deal, and people in rural Wisconsin don’t get their fair share, and people in cities don’t respect them and nobody listens to them or has a clue what is going on there,” said Kathy Cramer, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor and author of a book about politics and rural Wisconsin.

Quoted: Opponents, however, say these agreements are primarily ways for companies to protect themselves from the competition for workers. Keeping employees from changing jobs or launching their own ventures means companies can pay lower wages, said Martin Ganco, a University of Wisconsin-Madison business professor who specializes in noncompete contracts.

Noted: UW Journalism professor Mike Wagner appeared on 27 News at 5, while UW Political Science chair Dr. David Canon appeared on 27 News at 6. You can watch both interviews in the videos in this web story.

Quoted: UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said Clinton’s decision not to visit or invest heavily in the state proved to be a mistake.

Quoted: “There’s no evidence to suggest that making it easy to sell insurance across state lines is going to be an effective policy,” said Justin Sydnor, an associate professor of actuarial science, risk management and insurance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business.

Noted: While that just seems like a richly developed personal philosophy, it’s actually a common pattern in decision-making, according to new psychology research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin School of Business and the University of Minnesota. The study’s authors, Evan Polman of Wisconsin and Kathleen Vohs of Minnesota, find that deciding what someone else should do is less taxing and more pleasant than doing it for ourselves.

Though the percentage of people in both cases is relatively low, the statistic could highlight underlying clashes between people on whether the voter ID law is actually beneficial to Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin political science professor Barry Burden said.

Noted: The latest Wisconsin visits by Trump and Kaine could signify that the presidential contest in Wisconsin is tightening slightly, or it could be the latest symptom of a race that has defied all traditional rules for presidential campaigns, said UW-Madison political science professor Ken Mayer.

Noted: Numbers compiled by University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Barry Burden show if Clinton doesn’t come to Wisconsin it will be the first time since 1972 that both nominees for president didn’t campaign in Wisconsin before the general election. Burden said the last time was when Richard Nixon decided not to visit the state during his re-election campaign.

Quoted: “Health insurance was expensive before the Affordable Care Act,” said Donna Friedsam, director of Health policy programs at the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. “The difference is that people who could not get coverage before can get coverage.”