Mihir A. Desai, who currently serves as the Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance, the Senior Associate Dean for Planning and University Affairs, and the Chair of Doctoral Programs at Harvard Business School, has accepted a joint appointment to the faculty of Harvard Law School as a tenured Professor of Law.
An expert in tax policy, international finance and corporate finance, Desai was a visiting professor at HLS in 2009. A recipient of the Student Association Award for teaching excellence from the HBS Class of 2001, he will continue to teach in the General Management Program and various Executive Education Programs at HBS. He will also continue to co-teach a Public Economics course at Harvard College.
Said HLS Dean Martha Minow: “We at the law school are simply delighted to welcome Mihir Desai, one of the world’s leading experts on the appropriate design of tax policy in global settings. His expertise includes the links between corporate governance and taxation, the globalization of firm activities, and empirical effects of tax and economic policies. He is a superb teacher, as the students at Harvard Business School well know, and as our own students learned when he was a visiting professor here recently. His participation in our community has already enriched discussions among our strong faculty in tax law and policy, corporate governance, and finance. With his joint appointment, his gifts as an interlocutor, and his superb research and teaching, he will further strengthen the bridge between the Law School and the Business School.”
Said Desai: “I’m delighted to be joining the extraordinary community of scholars, staff and students at HLS. My recent visit cemented my sense of the remarkable collegiality and intellectual vibrancy of the law school.”
Professor Desai’s scholarship has appeared in numerous leading publications on economics, finance and public economics, including the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Public Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Journal, Harvard Business Review and Yale Law Journal, among others.
He is the author of “International Finance: A Casebook” (John Wiley & Sons, 2006), which features his many case studies on international corporate finance, and has contributed to book chapters on taxation, corporate governance, international finance, foreign investments and price stability. His writing and/or research also has appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Economist.
Desai is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in the Public Economics and Corporate Finance programs. He is on the advisory board of the International Tax Policy Forum and the NCAER-Brookings India Policy Reform. He also has served as an economic advisor for the ABA Task Force on International Tax Reform; an international research fellow for the Oxford Centre for Business Taxation; an associate editor for the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy; and a referee for numerous economic and financial journals.
Prior to teaching, Desai worked at CS First Boston, McKinsey & Co., and as an advisor to a number of firms and governmental organizations.
He received his Ph.D. in political economy from Harvard University; his MBA as a Baker Scholar from Harvard Business School; and a bachelors degree in history and economics from Brown University. In 1994, he was a Fulbright Scholar to India.