Globally, human activities impact from one-third to one-half of the earth’s land surface; a major component of development involves the construction of roads. In the US and Europe, road networks fragment normal animal movement patterns, reduce landscape permeability, and increase wildlife-vehicle collisions, often with serious wildlife population and human health consequences. Critically, the placement of wildlife crossing structures to restore landscape connectivity and reduce the number of wildlife-vehicle collisions has been a hit-or-miss proposition with little ecological underpinning, however recent important developments in allometric scaling laws can be used to guide their placement. In this paper, we used cluster analysis to develop domains of scale for mammalian species groups having similar vagility and developed metrics that reflect realistic species movement dynamics. We identified six home range area domains; three quarters of 102 species clustered in the three smallest domains. We used HR0.5 to represent a daily movement metric; when individual species movements were plotted against road mile markers, 71.2% of 72 species found in North America were included at distances of less-than-or-equals, slant1 mi. The placement of wildlife crossings based on the HR0.5 metric, along with appropriate auxiliary mitigation, will re-establish landscape permeability by facilitating wildlife movement across the roaded landscape and significantly improve road safety by reducing wildlife vehicle collisions.

This dissertation studies the complex interrelationship between finance and corporate innovation policy. In the first two chapters, I consider the real impact that financial structures and corporate governance can have on firm technological innovation. First, I use property rights theory to highlight how alternative financial contracting structures differ in their ability to nurture the innovative activities of their investee firms. Second, I examine how the firm’s choice of Chief Executive Officer (CEO), specifically the firm’s choice to install a firm founder or a non-firm founder (“professional”) as CEO, can impact interrelated dimensions of corporate policy and ultimately firm value. In the final chapter, I study the stock market consequences of corporate technological innovation. Specifically, I evaluate the ability of equity analysts and public market investors to identify and value a firm’s innovation search strategy, characterized as a choice between the exploration of new technological capabilities and the exploitation of a firm’s existing technological competencies.

In Chapter 1, Financial Contracting for Innovation: Property Rights in Action, I study the relative ability of three financial contracting structures - namely independent venture capital (IVC), corporate venture capital (CVC) and strategic alliances - to promote entrepreneurial firm innovation. In property rights theory, financial contracting structures can align property rights to promote start-up firm innovation. I first provide novel estimates that strategic alliances have 6% to 11% higher overall innovative success rates compared to corporate venture capital and independent venture capital, respectively. Then, using a matched quasi-experiment in clinical trials to decompose selection (endogenous matching) and treatment effects, I find that strategic alliances promote 5% higher overall innovative success rates than both CVC and IVC (33% change in relative terms). I map the underpinnings of alliance success to the mechanisms of knowledge sharing and willingness to support costly experimentation.

In Chapter 2, ‘Til Death Do Us Part: The Relative Merits of Founder CEOs, I address a question faced by every firm in the economy, namely is it optimal for a firm’s founder to lead the company as CEO? To identify the treatment effect of founder CEOs on corporate policy and firm value, I exploit a natural experiment involving exogenous founder-to-professional CEO turnovers that arise from a founder’s death or illness. I find that, relative to comparable firms that retain their founder CEO, firms that must switch to a professional CEO experience a 10% reduction in their internally generated innovation. However, professional CEOs counteract this reduced internal R&D productivity by acquiring external technologies through greater M&A activity, increasing firm leverage and nurturing larger, more stable top management teams. These combined policy changes appear to have offsetting firm value implications, implying a “horses for courses” approach to choosing between a founder CEO and a professional CEO.

In Chapter 3, Innovation Search Strategy and Predictable Returns (with Benjamin Balsmeier, Lee Fleming and Gustavo Manso), we hypothesize that because of the intangible and highly uncertain nature of innovation, investors may have difficulty processing information associated with a firm’s innovation and innovation search strategy. Due to cognitive and strategic biases, investors are likely to pay more attention to unfamiliar explorative patents rather than incremental exploitative patents. We find that firms focusing on exploitation rather than exploration tend to generate superior subsequent short-term operating performance. Analysts do not seem to detect this, as firms currently focused on exploitation tend to outperform the market’s near-term earnings expectations. The stock market also seems unable to accurately incorporate information about a firm’s innovation search strategy. We find that firms with exploitation strategies are undervalued relative to firms with exploration strategies and that this return differential is incremental to standard risk and innovation-based pricing factors examined in the prior literature. This result suggests a more nuanced view on whether stock market pressure hampers innovation, and may have implications for optimal firm financing choices and corporate disclosure policy.

The dynamic variability of Earth's outer radiation belt is due to the competition among various particle transport, acceleration, and loss processes. The following dissertation investigates electron resonance with Electromagnetic Ion Cyclotron (EMIC) waves as a potentially dominant mechanism driving relativistic electron loss from the radiation belts. EMIC waves have been previously studied as contributors to relativistic electron flux depletion. However, assumed limitations on the pitch angle and energy ranges within which scattering takes place leave uncertainties regarding the capability of the mechanism to explain sudden loss of core electron populations of the outer radiation belt. By introducing new methods to analyze EMIC wave-driven scattering signatures and relativistic electron precipitation events through a multi-point observation approach, this dissertation reveals the effectiveness of EMIC waves to drive losses of outer radiation belt electrons with a new resolution.

The research that composes this dissertation focuses on three key areas of the EMIC wave-relativistic electron relationship. A chapter comparing a single EMIC wave event with a pitch angle scattering signature shows that these waves can cause scattering of electrons at energies and pitch angles predicted by the wave-particle resonance condition. This initial study establishes the motivation and methodological groundwork for a statistical study which provides evidence for the common occurrence of these scattering signatures and shows that the energies and pitch angles affected by EMIC waves are often within the core radiation belt population.

A subsequent study then links scattering signatures to observations of relativistic electron precipitation events, revealing a significant coincidence rate between EMIC waves and precipitation events.

These three investigations together provide the first quantifiable tracing of relativistic electron precipitation events back to the driving EMIC wave, through verified scattering signatures. The results support EMIC wave-relativistic electron resonant interaction theory and provide strong quantitative evidence that EMIC waves can effectively drive losses of core radiation belt electrons.

The new knowledge gained here benefits the space physics community by informing space weather modelers and forecasters of the conditions that increase the efficiency of EMIC wave-driven radiation belt losses, and by introducing new and effective ways of identifying and analyzing EMIC wave-driven scattering to be used in future investigations.

International development nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) are a particularly good example of how transnational accountability commitments present challenges to producing credible accounts to diverse and at times competing stakeholder groups. This dissertation examines accountability at the intersections of power and knowledge production. I argue that the concept is necessarily a political and epistemic practice regulating human action through demands for its representation. Three assumptions support this treatment of accountability: the concept of accountability is applicable exclusively to human action; it assumes an agent has the freedom to choose and to self-regulate; and that an agent can produce an account that serves as credible evidence in verifying his actions are appropriate. The legibility and credibility criteria of accounts are examined through two distinct approaches to development. The "Modern Development Enterprise" is shaping upwards accountability expectations through funders' emphasis on aid effectiveness and the ability to demonstrate measurable "results". Funders are not only interested in verifying the effectiveness of past development interventions, they are also looking to secure development models which can assure their future investments will continue to maximize results for their money. "People-Centered Approaches" to development place an emphasis on the participation and empowerment of poor people, which has implications for knowledge-based accounts and claims of "downward accountability" by development agencies and INGOs. This focus on human agency, as both the means and the ends for development, drives specific methodological requirements for producing knowledge about poor-peoples' experiences and measuring people-centered interventions. Finally, the measurement practices of two INGOs are examined to demonstrate how they must negotiate multidirectional accountability to their stakeholders through methodological pluralism. Examples are drawn from the same food-security program in Bangladesh to illustrate how these specific and varied methodological requirements for measuring the work of development activities plays out in the INGOs' monitoring and evaluation practices. The preliminary evidence suggests that calls for multidirectional accountability may in fact ultimately take INGOs further from the sources of their credibility as development actors--their contribution as unique, value-based organizations and the ability to be responsive and accountable to those stakeholders who are the least powerful.