Faculty Projects
Senator Kaine
Gerry Warburg interviews Senator Kaine at the Batten School last year.
Batten School launches a MOOC to reach the world

Batten recently launched its first-ever massive open online course, “Public Policy Challenges of the 21st Century,” on the Coursera platform. Led by Professor Gerry Warburg and other Batten professors, the course includes video lectures from top leaders such as U.S. Senator Tim Kaine, former Congressman Tom Davis and former White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers. This comprehensive public policy course examines U.S.-China relations, health policy and defense policy, as well as policy-making in the states.


 

Lipscomb receives NASPAA Spotlight Award

Assistant Professor Molly Lipscomb received a Spotlight Award from the 2014 Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs and Administration. The recipients were chosen for outstanding contributions toward solving public sector problems. Lipscomb was recognized for her research on environmental issues in developing countries and their adaptation to lack of health and sanitation services. Her work has had impact in Brazil, India and Uganda, among other countries.


 

Reduced financial gains from high-school work experience

Professor Christopher Ruhm and his co-author, Charles Baum, have research that suggests the benefits of high-school work experience have changed over the last 20 years: The future wage benefits of working 20 hours per week in the senior year of high school have fallen from 8.3 percent (measured in 1987-89) to 4.4 percent (measured in 2008-10). Their working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research—titled “The Changing Benefits of Early Work Experience”—has been cited by The New York TimesBloomberg BusinessweekFast Company and others.


 

Shimshack makes recommendations to FDA

Associate Professor Jay Shimshack addressed the Federal Drug and Food Administration in late 2014 about the risk of fish consumption by pregnant women and households with young and nursing children. In particular, he discussed the strengths and weaknesses of formal government advice for seafood consumption. Shimshack suggested to the FDA’s Risk Communication Advisory Committee that new policies are most likely to be effective if more extensively pretested. He concluded by offering several key considerations for rigorous testing and for effective risk communication in this context.


 

Antismoking policy experimentation

Professor Craig Volden and his co-author, Charles Shipan, published “When the Smoke Clears: Expertise, learning and policy diffusion” in the Journal of Public Policy. The authors argue that in federal systems, governments have the opportunity to learn from the policy experiments and potential successes of other governments. Based on an analysis of antismoking restrictions targeted toward youth, Volden and Shipan find that U.S. states are more likely to emulate other states that have successfully limited youth smoking, and that political and policy expertise enhance the likelihood of emulating policy successes found in other states.


 

Stress and interracial contact examined

Sophie Trawalter, assistant professor of Public Policy and Psychology, has investigated stress and coping responses to interracial contact. She believes that as societies become increasingly diverse, miscommunication, misunderstandings and cultural tensions can impede the development of functional, thriving communities. In her research, she examines the impact of psychological biases in the public sphere. Ranging from the study of how bias can affect the delivery of medical care to understanding how different social groups respond to public spaces, her innovative work can help organizations and communities foster growth and promote equity and understanding.


 

Should we look at interstate wars differently?

Batten School Dean Allan Stam, along with Dan Reiter and Michael Horowitz, published “A Revised Look at Interstate Wars, 1816-2007” in the Journal of Conflict Resolution. The article analyzes the Correlates of War interstate war data version 4.0, which is critical for research in international relations. The authors found that in more than 30 percent of the 95 COW interstate wars, codings of at least one of the key variables—existence of the war, list of participants, initiator and outcome—needs to be revised. Their article describes a data set that incorporates these revisions.


 

Batten faculty among the ranks of NAPA fellows

The National Academy of Public Administration, which was chartered by Congress to serve federal, state and local governments, elects Fellows who will address emerging issues and contribute to the discourse on government through standing panels.

Three Batten School faculty members have been elected as NAPA Fellows in recent years. Raymond Scheppach, senior lecturer and former executive director of the National Governors Association, is a specialist in the role of states in policy formulation. Professor Eric Patashnik, director of Batten’s Center for Health Policy, is an elected Fellow and was awarded NAPA’s Louis Brownlow Book Award in 2009. Most recently, Professor James Savage, who also teaches political science at the University of Virginia, was elected a Fellow in fall 2014.

Through the trusted and experienced leadership exhibited by these Fellows, NAPA aims to improve the quality, performance and accountability of government. 

 

SPRING 2015 CONTENTS