Does Diversification Destroy Value? Evidence From Industry Shocks

Does corporate diversification reduce shareholder value? Since firms endogenously choose to diversify, exogenous variation in diversification is necessary in order to draw inferences about the causal effect. We examine changes in the within-firm dispersion of industry investment, or diversity.' We find that exogenous changes in diversity, due to changes in industry investment, are negatively related to firm value. Thus diversification destroys value, consistent with the inefficient internal capital markets hypothesis. This finding is not caused by measurement error. We also find that exogenous changes in industry cash flow diversity are negative related to firm value.

The Diversification Discount: Cash Flows vs. Returns

Diversified firms have different values than comparable portfolios of single-segment firms. These value differences must be due to differences in either future cash flows or future returns. Expected security returns on diversified firms vary systematically with relative value. Discount firms have significantly higher subsequent returns than premium firms. Slightly more than half of the cross-sectional variation in excess values is due to variation in expected future cash flows, with the remainder due to variation in expected future returns and to covariation between cash flow and returns.

Sustainable HRM: A How-to-Guide

There is a disconnect between the fields of human resources management (HRM) and sustainability. Historically, human resource managers focused strictly on maximizing the efficiency of people operations. Today, there is an opportunity—and a need—to leverage people strategy professionals to embed sustainability within their organizations while collaborating with diverse stakeholders beyond their organizations to advance both social and environmental sustainability. For this research, twenty-five people strategy professionals and eighteen sustainability professions were interviewed using a semistructured interview format of five key questions. Several themes emerged from these interviews which have been organized into a “Sustainable HRM How-to-Guide” for people strategy professionals who want to lead their organizations towards triple-bottom-line sustainability.Master of ScienceSchool for Environment and SustainabilityUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163336/1/Owen_Christopher_Practicum.pd

Implementation of the frequency-modulated sideband search method for gravitational waves from low mass X-ray binaries

We describe the practical implementation of the sideband search, a search for periodic gravitational waves from neutron stars in binary systems. The orbital motion of the source in its binary system causes frequency-modulation in the combination of matched filters known as the $\mathcal{F}$-statistic. The sideband search is based on the incoherent summation of these frequency-modulated $\mathcal{F}$-statistic sidebands. It provides a new detection statistic for sources in binary systems, called the $\mathcal{C}$-statistic. The search is well suited to low-mass X-ray binaries, the brightest of which, called Sco X-1, is an ideal target candidate. For sources like Sco X-1, with well constrained orbital parameters, a slight variation on the search is possible. The extra orbital information can be used to approximately demodulate the data from the binary orbital motion in the coherent stage, before incoherently summing the now reduced number of sidebands. We investigate this approach and show that it improves the sensitivity of the standard Sco X-1 directed sideband search. Prior information on the neutron star inclination and gravitational wave polarization can also be used to improve upper limit sensitivity. We estimate the sensitivity of a Sco X-1 directed sideband search on 10 days of LIGO data and show that it can beat previous upper limits in current LIGO data, with a possibility of constraining theoretical upper limits using future advanced instruments.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figure

A Physicalist Account of Consciousness and the Conceivability Argument

I argue that David Chalmers’s Conceivability Argument is just as easily applied to a physical account of consciousness as it is applied to dualism, which implies that the Conceivability Argument yields absurd conclusions. To do so, I give a physical account of phenomenal consciousness within the brain, and then argue that conceiving of zombies is begging the question. I also suggest that because I have a plausible account of phenomenal consciousness based within the physical, such a consciousness is just as conceivable as a zombie would be in the Conceivability Argument. As I have given a conceivable account of physical phenomenal consciousness, one can use the Conceivability Argument for both a dualist and non-dualist account of consciousness

Global genomic diversity of a major wildlife pathogen: Ranavirus, past and present

Ranavirus is a genus of large double-stranded DNA viruses (family Iridoviridae) that parasitise three taxonomic classes of poikilothermic vertebrates. They are important wildlife pathogens of conservation and economic concern, posing significant threat to amphibian biodiversity and aquaculture commerce. Despite substantial advances since their discovery in the 1960s, the evolutionary history of ranaviruses remains poorly characterised. The aim of this thesis is to advance the characterisation of Ranavirus evolutionary dynamics to contemporary standards. A large whole-genome dataset was collated and scrutinised, combining all publicly available material with a novel collection of isolate genomes. Cutting-edge microbial genomics tools were applied to gain insight into ranavirus genetic diversity, phylogeography, and genome evolution. Delineation of the Ranavirus pan-genome served as a foundation to conduct phylogenetic and population genetic analyses. Where the limitations of alignment-based methodologies were met, alignment-free techniques were employed to make full use of all genomic information. Phylogenetic reconstructions uncovered unique genetic diversity incompatible with current taxonomic demarcations amongst several lineages of Ranavirus. Pervasive genetic recombination was detected across the genus, and certain lineages contained a high degree of ancestral polyphyly. Recurrent patterns linked to animal trade and aquaculture were detected. Extensively polyphyletic viruses were isolated from captive animals, and population genetic analysis revealed ancestry components shared by ranaviruses isolated from farmed animals on separate continents. Finally, phylodynamic analysis suggests human-mediated translocation of FV3-like ranaviruses began more than a century before present. The inadequacies of current Ranavirus taxonomy are highlighted by this work, and suggests a substantial diversity remains to be characterised. The processes by which ranaviral genetic diversity is generated appears particularly dynamic, with significant contributions made via recombination between distinct linages. Altogether, this thesis underscores the vital impact trade and captive rearing of fish and herpetofauna have had on the global spread of ranaviruses and their processes of genetic diversification. Finally, these results suggest that anthropogenic influences commenced decades earlier than previously thought, likely upon the acceleration of modern globalisation