Social Transformations and Labour Market Entry: An Investigation into University Systems in Emerging Economies

Exclusion provokes a waste of talents and incalculable cultural and economic losses. Today, given the increasing number of qualified women and blacks, the lack of representation in top-job positions in knowledge-intensive occupations is hard to explain without considering network mechanisms in the entry process. Entering those occupations comprises training and supervision, collaboration, and mutual evaluation and often those tasks involve the same people. This implies that networks between agents, groups, and institutions form and are at the heart of learning, evaluation and promotion decisions. Thus, my thesis investigates network mechanisms of the entry process in academia with the empirical focus of South Africa and Mexico. First, I examine the tendency to form same-race and same-gender student-advisor relations in the educational phase. Then, I analyse this tendency closer asking whether it affects the doctoral productivity of the couples and whether its effect changes for students with high or low productivity profile. Lastly, I study how universities' prestige and first job-mobility affects scholars' future performance. My work highlights that the inertia of individual and institutional relations explains the lack of transformations in prestigious positions that, in turn, slow down transformations at lower levels. Besides this disheartening result, my work shows that when agents overcome the inertia, creating “uncommon” relations, they perform at the highest levels underlining the gains from inclusion.