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ABOUT ME

I received my undergraduate in accounting from Pennsylvania State University - the Behrend College. I originally majored in Physics. In my free time, I engage in creative activities, go for walks, stay up entirely too late, and spend time with friends and family playing board games. 

 

I am supported by my wonderful husband Ethan Brightbill, to whom I have been married for 4 years. We own two FELV positive cats we love (and tolerate) - Basque and Mischief.* Because of the creative nature of my husbands' career as a writer, we are not geographically constrained in job searches.

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*Sadly, we lost Bonnie to her disease.

mary collins.jpg

My research uses archival and analytical methods to answer questions such as:

  • Do analyst teams issue higher quality forecasts? (Dissertation)

  • How do analyst teams respond to crisis events? (work in process)

  • How does probability weighting influence analyst bias? (with Mark Penno and Cristi Gleason)

  • How does the smoothing effect of accruals impact the kink in the earnings distribution?

  • How do analysts use hedging language to improve market response to bold forecasts? (with Bradford Hepfer)

  • Can disclosure regulation lead to less informative disclosures in high Gricean populations? (with Mark Penno)

EDUCATION

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Sell-Side Financial Analysts

My research explores the effect of team-work on the quality of analyst forecasts both generally and conditionally. I also explore whether reliance on an ignorance prior can explain forecast bias.

2005 - 2010 

Pennsylvania State University

Bachelors of Accounting.

Pragmatics

My research explores whether applying linguistic theories can explain differences in how the market responds to voluntary or mandatory disclosures.

Distributional Artifacts

My research explores whether the smoothing effect of accrual-based accounting can induce kinks around salient benchmarks

2013 - 2018

University of Iowa

Ph.D in Accounting (Minor Finance)

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