Edward Owens
Assistant Professor of Accounting | Emory University, Goizueta Business School
Atlanta, GA, UNITED STATES
Links (2)
Biography
Edward Owens completed his PhD in Accounting at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2010. Prior to joining the faculty at Emory in 2014, Owens held positions at the University of Rochester's Simon Business School, General Motors Acceptance Corporation Financial Services, and American Financial Group. Owens' research interests include the debt and equity market consequences of financial accounting information, the effects of financial distress on the production and use of accounting information and international accounting issues.
Education (3)
University of North Carolina: PhD, Accounting 2010
Goizueta Business School, Emory University: Master's, Business Administration Finance 2003
University of Georgia: Bachelor's, Risk Management and Finance 1994
Areas of Expertise (2)
Debt Contracting
Information Asymmetry in Capital Markets
Publications (3)
Measuring the Probability of Financial Covenant Violation in Private Debt Contracts
Journal of Accounting and Economics
2013 We measure the probability that a borrower will violate financial covenants in private debt contracts. We analyze hand-coded data and specify standard covenant definitions using Compustat data that minimize measurement error for all individual Dealscan covenants. We use these definitions to create a measure of aggregate probability of violation, which can be used across all covenants in a loan or among covenant subsets of interest. We provide evidence that our aggregate probability measure is superior to alternatives used in prior literature.
Idiosyncratic Shocks to Firm Underlying Economics and Abnormal Accruals
Social Science Research Network
2013 Economics challenge the specification of discretionary accrual models. Because rent-seeking firms pursue differentiated business strategies, firms in the same industry experience idiosyncratic shocks due to heterogeneous economic fundamentals and hence have different accrual generating processes. We present evidence that idiosyncratic shocks are widespread, propagate through multiple years of financial statements, and reduce accrual models’ goodness of fit. This not only affects abnormal accrual estimates for the firm experiencing shocks, but also affects measurement of abnormal accruals for other firms in the industry. We show that idiosyncratic shocks not only add noise to abnormal accruals, but can also exacerbate bias in both unsigned and signed abnormal accruals. We propose ways to reduce accrual model misspecification.
Earnings Comovement and Accounting Comparability: The Effects of Mandatory IFRS Adoption
Simon School Working Papers
2010 We examine changes in cross-country financial statement comparability around mandatory IFRS adoption and the effects of these changes on firms’ information environments, as captured by analyst properties and bid-ask spreads. First, we show that cross-country earnings comovement is negatively associated with favorable properties of the firm-level information environment. In contrast, we show that cross-country accounting comparability is positively associated with favorable properties of the information environment. We further document that, whereas IFRS adoption increased cross-country earnings comovement, it did not increase accounting comparability relative to a control sample of non-adopting firms. Finally, we show directly that the increases in earnings comovement experienced by IFRS adopters have negative effects on firms’ information environments. This finding provides novel evidence that increases in earnings comovement associated with IFRS adoption diminished financial statement users’ ability to extract information from cross-country firm comparisons.
In the News (1)
Knowledge Creation: A look at research from Spring 2016
emorybusiness.com online
2016-05-12
In a research study from Edward Owens, assistant professor of accounting, and Joanna Shuang Wu (U of Rochester), the authors examine bank reporting of short-term borrowings in the repo market.