Peter Easton
Citation
Peter Douglas Easton graduated as valedictorian with a Bachelor of Agricultural Science and Bachelor of Economics from the University of Adelaide. He went on to complete a PhD in Business Administration at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983. He is presently the Notre Dame Alumni Professor of Accountancy and Academic Director of the Center for Accounting Research and Education at the Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame. Prior to his appointment at Notre Dame in 2003, Peter was the John J. Gerlach Professor of Accounting at The Ohio State University, the Price Waterhouse Professor of Accounting and Finance at Macquarie University and Assistant Professor of Accounting at the University of Chicago. Peter Easton has served as visiting professor at a multitude of universities around the world including Adelaide, Chicago, the Limperg Institute, Melbourne, NUS, Seoul National, UNSW, UTS, and Victoria-Wellington. He has contributed significantly through the supervision and examination of twenty-one PhD students and has made significant contributions to the accounting literature. His research deals with topics in corporate valuation, financial statement analysis and more recently sustainability. With Trevor Harris he progressed the research from the seminal Ball and Brown (1968) paper to consider how the structure of accounting relates to ways in which accounting earnings are correlated with market prices. He introduced the earnings response coefficient methodology which has become a mainstay of much empirical research and developed methods to extract from price, an implied cost of capital using accounting information. The earning response coefficient methodology has been used in numerous courts of law to estimate damages arising from accounting misstatements and fraud. Peter Easton’s research has been published widely in all the leading scholarly journals, and he is co-author of five important texts focused on financial statements. In 2022 he founded a peer-reviewed journal, Accountability in a Sustainable World Quarterly, which publishes papers written by both academics and practitioners with a target audience of both groups. Peter Easton was a founding editor of the Review of Accounting Studies in 1994 and has served as associate editor of, inter alia, The Accounting Review, Accounting & Finance, Journal of Accounting Research, Contemporary Accounting Research, Journal of Business Finance and Accounting and the Journal of Accounting and Economics. Peter Easton has also been an institution builder. At the University of Notre Dame, he founded, with considerable success, the Center for Accounting Research and Education with the objective of strengthening the bridges between accounting research, accounting education and accounting practice. In 2019, Peter Easton received the Limperg Medal from the Limperg Institute for his sustained contribution to the accounting research community in The Netherlands.