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Jenny Zha Giedt Assistant Professor of
Accounting George Washington University School of Business Washington, DC
Research interests:
[6]
"Why Are Firms Sold? Disentangling Target Motives and Bidders' Selection of Targets" (2018), Washington Area Research
Symposium paper 2017 and AAA Annual Meeting paper 2017. Link
[5] "Economic Consequences of Announcing Strategic Alternatives" (2018), SSRN working
paper which is based on my job market paper. Link Motivation: Little is known about the consequences of publicly revealing that a company is exploring strategic alternatives, yet managers and directors face this disruptive disclosure decision when their company seeks to sell itself in the M&A market. At first glance, the average announcement return of 6% suggests that this voluntary disclosure increases shareholder value. However, the eventual success or failure of the firm's attempt to sell itself allows me to identify the costs and benefits associated with disclosure: a valuation premium is only captured if a sale is consumated. Otherwise, if a firm announces that it's seeking strategic alternatives but ultimately fails to sell itself, the announcement premium gradually reverses and the long-run abnormal returns are negative! Further tests examine some potential mechanisms of how the announcement may affect firm value: the announcement leads to raised investor attention, a greater number of bidders in the sale process, worse operating performance, and more departing employees. [4] "Defining, Measuring
and Modeling Accruals: A Guide for Researchers" (forthcoming) with Chad Larson and Richard Sloan, Review of
Accounting Studies. Link Motivation: Measures of accruals and models of discretionary accruals are widely used in financial accounting research. Yet, empirical researchers are faced with many measures and models to choose from, where some of the commonly choosen ones are incomplete and fragmented. To guide researchers, this paper provides a comprehensive definition and meaure of accruals, and shows how some existing measures of accruals fit in as a component of comprehensive accruals. For resesarchers interested in modeling non-disccretionary accruals, this paper provides a more comprehensive model specification that takes into account the normal properties of accruals. Overall, we urge researchers to carefully consider which measure of accruals to use and how to model normal variation in accruals. [3] "Modeling Receivables
and Deferred Revenues to Detect Revenue Management" (2018), Abacus, Special Issue on Earnings Management. Link
[2] "On
the Pricing of Mandatory DCF Disclosures: Evidence from Oil and Gas Royalty Trusts" (2015) with Panos Patatoukas and
Richard Sloan, The Accounting Review. Link Motivation: In the value-relevance literature, tests of the relation between an asset's value on the financial statments and the asset's market value are typically plagued by measurement issues, from imputing the asset's market value, and model misspecification issues, from imperfectly controlling for the company's other assets and liabilities. Oil and gas royalty trusts, however, provide a cleaner setting to conduct a value-relevance test because the primary assets of these trusts are mature oil and gas reserves, their other assets and liabilities are negligible, and the asset's estimated value is clearly disclosed in 10-Ks. We find that managerial DCF estimates of oil and gas reserves are priced by investors, yet investors may buoyantly overlook the finite nature of these reserves until media coverage prompts the stock price to coverge with the DCF estimate. [1] "Stock Prices and Earnings: A History of Research" (2014) with Patricia Dechow and Richard
Sloan, Annual Review of Financial Economics. Link Motivation: The financial accounting and capital markets literature is storied and vast. This paper summarizes the main properties of earnings and its components, and how they are useful to investors and relate to stock prices. Select empirical findings in this area are extended to the present period, including price and volume reactions to accounting information, the value-relevance of various earnings measures, and portfolio returns to accounting-based trading strategies. Jenny is an Assistant Professor at the George Washington University School of Business. Her
research examines financial accounting and disclosure choices made by corporations and their effects on the stock market and
market for corporate control. Jenny graduated with a PhD in Business Administration (Accounting emphasis) in 2016 from the
Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and is a Deloitte Foundation doctoral fellow. Her
UC Berkeley dissertation explores why certain companies voluntarily announce that they are seeking strategic alternatives,
and documents the costs and benefits associated with the announcement. Her dissertation is titled, "Voluntary Disclosure of Strategic Alternatives: A Cost-Benefit Analysis" (2016). Link Prior
to Berkeley, she worked as an auditor and forensic accountant at KPMG in Los Angeles, CA, and obtained her CPA. She also has
experience in the mutual fund and hedge fund industries with US Bank and Dorchester Capital. She earned her Bachelor's degrees from the University of Southern California in Accounting and Business
Administration (Finance emphasis). In her spare time, Jenny enjoys
snorkeling, ice skating, skiing, and
yoga.
Email: zhagiedt@gwu.edu
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