Blueprint for an Innovation Economy in Florida Research as Economic Foundation | Page 11

WHAT THE DATA MEANS

Increases in scientific strength positively impact the mix of high-wage STEM jobs in a metropolitan statistical area . The relationship was shown to be statistically significant with an R 2 of . 33 . The data for citations and STEM jobs are converted to common scale ( indices ) by standardization to z-scores . The z-scores are constructed from the natural log of raw data which was used to transform both data sets to normal distributions . ( See Exhibit D for a more detailed discussion of the statistical analysis .)

The use of standardization divides our chart into four quadrants which help visually cluster the MSAs . Florida stands out in that no Florida MSA with a research university belongs to the upper right quadrant where both citations and the percentage of STEM jobs are high . Only Tallahassee is above the line dividing the upper quadrant and lower . Tallahassee has 6.2 percent of its jobs defined as STEM . The break in quadrants is at 5.6 percent .

Arguably , Tallahassee ’ s status as a capital city increases the number of STEM jobs reported ( See Sidebar ). One would expect a “ center of government ” to employ a number of STEM positions given the technical nature of governing ( transportation engineers , epidemiologists , economists , etc .). The data support this hypothesis .

CAPITAL CITIES

With minor differences in citation counts , the 13 cities with populations similar to Tallahassee , that are also state capitals , average 1.4 percent more STEM jobs . Comparing all 109 cities , the 27 that are capitals average 1.6 percent more STEM jobs than the 82 that are not .

Running simple regressions and comparing raw citations to the percent of STEM jobs in capital vs . non-capital cities leads to the same conclusion . With both lines of best fit , the slopes are similar , but the intercept of the MSAs that are capitals adds 1 percent more STEM jobs than the same regression for non-capital MSAs .

The data indicates the impact an MSA also being a state capital is an increase of 1 percent to 1.5 percent in STEM employment .

Florida MSAs underperform in the production of scientific output and STEM employment relative to peer cities of similar size or status as a seat of state government .

TABLE 1 : Peer State Comparison 21 Factor of Florida

Florida 1.00 1.00 5.98 1.00 California 3.67 6.33 10.32 1.73 Texas 1.90 2.54 8.00 1.34 New York 2.00 2.88 8.60 1.44 CA / TX / NY 2.52 3.92 9.28 1.55

9