(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007-11-13)
Gatchair, Sonia Denise
This study examined whether the demand for more educated science and engineering workers outweighed longstanding practices of discrimination in hiring in high technology industries and science and engineering occupations. The study focused on the effects of education on the distribution of employment and wages among four racial and ethnic groups (non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks, Hispanics and Asians), for the period 1992 to 2002. The main data used in the analyses came from the March Annual Demographic Survey. Multinomial logit analyses were used to determine the probabilities of employment, and ordinary least squares, non-parametric regressions and t-tests were used to examine wages. The analyses showed that education was more important in determining employment in S &E occupations, when compared to its effects in other occupations; and compared to race, other demographic and labor market characteristics. The effects of education were greater in S &E jobs in the high technology sector when compared to S &E jobs elsewhere in the economy. However, the effects of education varied with race, the level of education, and the industry/ occupational group under consideration in ways that suggest that both employment and wages continue to be influenced by correlates of race. Based on the findings, the study provides recommendations for policy and future research.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007-07-09)
Bortagaray, Isabel
The building of agro-biotechnology capabilities in small countries:
The cases of Costa Rica, New Zealand and Uruguay.
Isabel Bortagaray
411 pages
Directed by Dr. Susan E. Cozzens
This dissertation has studied the role of institutional environments on the building of agro-biotechnological capabilities in small countries, through a comparative case study design. The key question was whether the institutional environments in Costa Rica, New Zealand and Uruguay have evolved in a way that have fostered or hindered the transition towards modern biotechnology at the level of firms and sector. Biotechnology provided a particularly interesting area of study because of the dramatic changes it has undergone since the 1970s and consequently, it facilitated to study the transition from second generation to third generation biotechnology. Innovation studies have trend to focus on pharmaceutical biotechnology. This research however, attempted to understand the dynamics behind biotechnology applied to agriculture, in countries with agricultural-based economies. In this context three small countries were selected: Costa Rica, New Zealand and Uruguay, based on some commonalities in terms of size (population), their reliance on agriculture, and some historical features that inter-connect them. The choice of biotechnology applied to agriculture enabled to study the extent to which the institutional environments have changed and processed change vis a vis fundamental technological development. The institutional environment was defined as composed by institutions (rules of the game), the web of organizations (players of the game), and policies. Technological capabilities were defined as composed by skills, processes and resources. Primary data was collected based on in-depth interviews to research organizations, hybrid research-related organizations, firms, and policy-making agencies in each country. These findings suggest that institutional thickness (number and variety of organizations and institutions), cohesiveness (shared sense of strategic purpose), and coherence between institutions and policies with regard to their goals and means are crucial for strengthening more complex, cumulative, encompassing (different biotechnologies with multiple focuses), and expanding biotechnologies.