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ItemThe Mobilization of Social Networks in Professional Development Decision-Making – A Mixed-Methods Study in a Technical Field(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2022-08-02) Ruthotto, IsabelTHE MOBILIZATION OF SOCIAL NETWORKS IN PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT DECISION-MAKING –A MIXED-METHODS STUDY IN A TECHNICAL FIELD Isabel Ruthotto 171 pages Directed by Dr. Julia Melkers Vast technological innovations have been transforming labor markets and workplaces. Against this background, identifying ways to foster a skilled and resilient technical workforce and determining what role industry, higher education institutions, and policymakers play in this regard has become a core concern of political and societal debates. The dissertation contributes to this discourse by looking at how adults working in tech decided to invest in skill development and professional advancement through the pursuit of an online graduate degree in computer science. The dissertation seeks to understand whether, when, and how social networks influenced this decision process. The focus on networks is important since it addresses a distinct gap as to how decision-making has traditionally been conceptualized. The results support the central argument that the decision to pursue an online graduate degree is seldom an internal, autonomous thought process, but is often shaped by social relationships through consultation, advice, and support. Family members, friends, coworkers, supervisors, and acquaintances all matter in this process – albeit to varying extents and in different capacities. A complex set of individual and contextual factors influence the broad range of social support-seeking during decision-making. The results validate the importance of examining professional development choices in social contexts, offer several theoretical and policy implications, and open avenues for future research.
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ItemA QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF OWNERSHIP-INDUCED QUALITY GAPS IN THE LONG-TERM CARE SECTOR: INFLUENCES OF OWNERSHIP CONVERSIONS, SELF-REPORTING, REGULATORY REFORMS, AND THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2022-08-01) Coskun, Muhammet EmreThis dissertation presents a quantitative analysis of the association between ownership types and quality of services in the long-term care sector in the United States. The study employs dynamic difference-in-differences models to investigate the effects of for-profit ownership conversions on nursing home quality indicators by drawing on national-level panel data for the years between 2013 and 2021. Additionally, the adverse effects of information asymmetries are examined by comparing changes in government-inspected quality measures with changes in self-reported quality measures following a for-profit conversion of a nursing home. Furthermore, the impact of the recent regulatory changes implemented at the end of 2016 in the nursing home sector and the facility-level factors associated with the COVID-19 pandemic outcomes in nursing homes are examined with respect to the quality trends and differences in quality by ownership types. Lastly, this study explores the relationship between ownership and quality in assisted living facilities in the State of Georgia using state inspection data. Overall, this dissertation finds that for-profit ownership status is associated with worse quality outcomes among nursing homes and assisted living facilities, including adverse outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the analyses show that the recent regulatory reforms had little to no effect on improving the quality of nursing homes over time. The findings are discussed to help policymakers formulate new policies and effective regulations to improve the quality of long-term care.
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ItemScience Gone Wrong: Understanding scientific work by examining "failures" across productions, consumptions, and careers in science(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2022-08-01) Woo, Seokkyun JoshuaThis dissertation examines “failures” across three different dimensions of the production of science (production of data, impacts, careers) to further expand our understanding of scientific work, thereby providing effective implications for science policy. The first study (Chapter 2) involves ethnographic observation of the work of bench scientists at material science labs to understand the problem-solving activities involving frequent interruptions in producing experimental data. The second study (Chapter 3) expands our understanding of citation practice in scholarly communication. In doing so, I examine citations to retracted references to test existing theories and propose an additional mechanism for how scientists embed other scientists’ works into their papers. The last study (Chapter 4) addresses the long-standing issue of gender inequality in scientific careers. In doing so, I ask how the increasingly bifurcated production role in science may shape career longevity and how this relationship may differ between women and men scientists. Together, these studies use a sociology of work perspective to better understand various components of the production of science in order to develop a deeper understanding of the science of science as well as to inform policy debates and other initiatives designed to improve the production of science.
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ItemSetting the Agenda for AI: Actors, Issues, and Influence in United States Artificial Intelligence Policy(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2022-06-02) Schiff, Daniel S.As research and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly advanced in the early 21st century, determining how to govern AI has become a global priority. Key questions include how AI should be understood as a policy domain, which policy problems are most pressing, which solutions are most viable, and who should have a say in this process. This dissertation seeks to provide key insights into the early years of AI policy, focusing on the development of the emerging AI policy agenda in the United States. To do so, it examines and reveals which issues, actors, and influence efforts are playing a prominent role in the complex, ambiguous, and contested process of agenda-setting. The research performed draws on a variety of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, including document analysis, text-as-data and time series approaches, and experimental techniques. Data examined include text from U.S. federal AI policy documents, traditional and social media discourse from federal policymakers, media, and members of the public, and engagement data collected from state legislators who participated in a field experiment. The results reveal that social and ethical dimensions of AI receive a heightened degree of attention in AI policy discourse. However, consideration of these issues remains partially superficial and subsumed into concern about AI's potential for economic innovation and role in geopolitical competition. Further findings demonstrate that policy entrepreneurs can use persuasive narratives to influence legislators about AI policy, and that these narratives are just as effective as technical information. Finally, despite pervasive calls for public participation in AI governance, the public does not appear to play a key role in directing attention to AI's social and ethical implications nor in shaping concrete policy solutions, such that the emerging AI agenda remains primarily expert-driven. The dissertation's findings and theoretical and methodological approaches offer key contributions to policy process scholarship and related fields of research, and provide a baseline on which to understand the evolution of the AI policy agenda and AI governance going forward.
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ItemManifestations of the Positive Death Movement in America: Medical Aid In Dying, Voluntarily Stopping Eating & Drinking, and End-Of-Life Doulas(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2022-04-06) Incorvaia, Aubrey DeVenyWestern society is in an era of death awareness, its most recent salience: A Positive Death Movement. This dissertation examines manifestations of the movement, framing them as direct, indirect, and induced effects of public policy. Policies have intended consequences, off-target effects, as well as more distant, rippling impacts on society at-large. The empirical research herein investigates these dimensions of policy’s influence, leveraging an assortment of theoretical lenses, which originate from policy design, social psychology, and sociology. Methods incorporate both qualitative and quantitative approaches, tools, and techniques. Chapter one presents the history of American death culture and overviews the movement for death positivity and its scholarship. Chapter two shows that implementation of Medical Aid in Dying (MAID) policy reduces self-harm and undetermined intent death rates for those with cancer. Specifically, use of regression analysis to generate a difference-in-differences estimation indicates that implementation of MAID results in a statistically significant 20 percent reduction in self-harm and undetermined intent cancer death rate, even when controlling for individual and macro-level risk factors. Chapter three examines a church’s response to Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking, revealing that a church community may be a source of legitimacy and support for this end-of-life choice to hasten death in the face of terminal illness. A case study of one southern Anabaptist congregation employs a focus group and one-on-one interviews during which study participants reported their affirmation of VSED, but professed uncertain and conditional involvement in respite care provision post VSED initiation. Responses varied widely to faith-based justifications for the practice. Chapter four uses analytic autoethnography to elucidate a new role arising within the system of deathcare, End-of-Life Doulas (EOLDs). Two EOLD training programs framed their education in hallmark terms of the movement and are seeking to professionalize the role through the use of functionalist / trait – oriented documents, an approach aligned with a ‘sociology of professions’ framework. Chapter five concludes the dissertation by summarizing results and considering opportunities for future research, while also acknowledging the necessity of addressing ongoing impacts of the coronavirus pandemic and the racial reckoning currently underway in the United States.
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ItemBangladesh Bank Cyber Heist: Incident Analysis(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2022) Balu, RamkumarIn one of the largest cyber heists that took place in February 2016, the Central Bank of Bangladesh (Bangladesh Bank) lost $81 million from its account held in Federal Reserve Bank of New York. By applying Diamond model of Intrusion Analysis, the paper discusses core features and phases involved in the attack. In the later part, the paper discusses policy assessment at various levels as well as the policy impact that happened in response to the incident.
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ItemExplaining US Cybersecurity Policy Integration Through a National Regime Lens(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-12-14) Farhat, KarimThis research uses the Policy Regime Framework to analyze which of two policy problems, US-China rivalry or IT/OT convergence, better explain degrees of coherence and integration in the US cybersecurity regime. It explains how regime actors address and negotiate these problems across the ICT and energy sectors. A process-tracing methodology was used to track outcomes and explanatory factors, linking causal mechanisms through an analysis of the Congressional record and in-depth stakeholder interviews. The results indicate how the idea of Chinese ICTs as a Trojan horse for the Chinese Community Party’s strategy was more effective than IT/OT convergence at mobilizing interests and advancing coherent cybersecurity policy. Trade and ICT policies were successfully integrated to achieve cybersecurity goals as regime interests bargained to 'weaponize' critical trade interdependencies through the US competitive advantage in the semiconductor industry. This research lends further validity to the Policy Regime Framework in researching cross-sector-spanning policy problems in the ICT space especially given recent calls for whole-of-government approaches to address emerging strategic technologies.
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ItemDiamond Model of Intrusion Analysis – Travelex Ransomware Attack(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-12) Caras, Constantine J.Through the application of the Diamond Model of Intrusion Analysis, this paper identifies and intricately examines all core features of the incident, highlighting the hacker’s modus operandi and defining causal relationships between every phase of the attack. Furthermore, a policy assessment is conducted to illustrate which societal layer could best address this variant of intrusion to support stronger proactive security defense in the future.
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ItemChallenges in the electrification of transportation: electric vehicle charging behavior, micromobility for urban transportation, and cost reductions in battery technologies(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-08-03) Apablaza, Camila ZrinkaThis dissertation work explores three questions related to some of the challenges present in the ongoing electrification of transportation. Specifically, I target issues related to electric vehicle charging at the workplace, micromobility as a growing urban transportation mode, and the cost reductions observed in lithium-ion batteries during the last decade. Each chapter relies on novel data and quantitative methods to contribute new understanding about the direction that public and private decision makers can follow to achieve a faster and more effective transition to electric mobility. The first chapter examines two deterrence mechanisms used at a large workplace charging program implemented in the U.S. Using high frequency data, we separately identify the effects of price and behavioral incentives that encourage workplace charging norms and resource sharing. Our findings provide new evidence that group norms can play an important role in driving behavioral compliance when setting EV access policies. We also find that workplace norms are complements to dynamic pricing policies. We discuss the implications of this data discovery for the effective management of common pool resources in the context of workplace charging and space-constrained environments. The second chapter aims at determining the impact of the City of Atlanta’s nighttime shared scooters and e-bikes ban on travel times in urban areas. We use high-resolution data from Uber Movement to analyze a policy experiment in the City of Atlanta in which shared e-scooter and e-bike mobility was banned daily during evening hours of 9:00pm-4:00am with near perfect compliance. We find that the policy had an unintended effect on commuter travel times. Although the ban addressed public safety concerns about scooter use, it also resulted in unintended economic damages related to the value of time spent in traffic. The third chapter evaluates the causes of cost decrease in lithium-ion batteries during the 2012-2020 period. The analysis includes modeling the cost components per kWh of lithium-ion battery packs used in automotive commercial applications in 2012, 2015, and 2020. Mechanisms of cost reductions including R&D, learning-by-doing, and economies of scale are used to explain the changes in cost. We find that most of the cost change can be attributed to R&D investments made both by the public and private sectors.
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ItemWhat Work? Quasi-Experiments in Cybersecurity Policy Interventions(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2021-07-30) Grindal, Karl T.Given the significance policymakers place on cybersecurity, how effective has a decade of policy interventions been at reducing social costs? This paper uses the limited regulations implemented by State and United States government agencies as quasi-experiments. This work measures regulatory efficacy by compiling mandatory state-level data breach reports to create novel breach incident data sets. A reduction in breach frequency serves as the kind of measurable outcome that regulators would intend cybersecurity policy interventions to address. To this end, I evaluate four cybersecurity regulations: the Massachusetts Data Security Law, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act), Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Section 5 enforcements against Wyndham Hotels, and the New York Department of Financial Services (NY DFS) cybersecurity regulations. I assessed each regulatory intervention as a quasi-experiment, employing segmented time-series regressions to evaluate the relative change in reported data breaches. These quasi-experiments controlled for policy implementation phases and reporting requirements. As these policies have overlapping aims (creating information security programs), we can infer whether this meta-regulatory approach, the encouragement of self-regulation by industry with corresponding civil penalties, has been an effective regulatory strategy. An effectively regulatory system would sufficiently motivate the targeted population to improve their cyber posture, such that there was a reduction in breach reporting. Ultimately, three of the cases discussed did not show an impact. However, analysis of the NY DFS regulation suggests a meaningful decrease of approximately 27 breaches in the following year. Comparing these regulations shows differences in scope, content, and penalties that may explain this disparate level of impact. Next, the efficacy of NY DFS regulations is placed in context with a discussion of potential savings and the duration of the effect. While demonstrating that cybersecurity regulations can meaningfully reduce breaches, this work suggests that this effect is neither generalizable across diverse contexts nor a satisfactory solution to the complex and pervasive issues associated with identity theft, fraud, and cybercrime. Overall, these findings suggest potential promise in this methodology for the policy evaluation of data security laws and regulations. Policymakers could improve these assessments by standardizing the reporting of mandatory breach notification data so that policy efficacy can be better measured. Because of its similarity to the NY DFS regulations, this finding may also provide preliminary empirical evidence for the Insurance Data Security Model Law propagated by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. Drawing on this methodology, this model legislation and other data security and privacy regulatory interventions should now be the subject for future research. The first step for policymakers seeking to design rules to protect citizen's privacy and security is knowing what works?