Speaker Biographies
Mihir A. Desai is the Rock Center Associate Professor in the finance and entrepreneurial management areas and the MBA Class of 1961 Fellow at Harvard Business School. Professor Desai’s research focuses on international corporate and public finance. His academic publications have appeared in several journals, including the Review of Financial Studies, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, and the National Tax Journal. He is also the author of International Finance: A Casebook (John Wiley & Sons, 2006), which features his many case studies on international corporate finance. He is a faculty research fellow in the National Bureau of Economic Research’s (NBER) Public Economics and Corporate Finance Programs and is co-director of the NBER’s India program. His research has been cited in The Economist, BusinessWeek, the New York Times, and several other publications. His professional experiences include working at CS First Boston and McKinsey & Co., and advising a number of firms and governmental organizations.
Jonathan Hare is an international tax partner with the UK firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers. He is currently based in New York, where he heads the UK tax desk. Hare has a great deal of experience in advising large multinational companies on cross-border (particularly U.S.-UK) transactions, including group reorganizations and financing transactions. In addition to being an international structuring specialist, Hare is a member of the UK firm’s EU developments group. He regularly advises clients on the impact EU developments may have on their groups’ tax profiles and he assists them in formulating and implementing strategies for dealing with these developments.
Bill Thomas, former chairman of the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee, is a visiting fellow at AEI. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1978–2007, most recently representing California’s Twenty-Second Congressional District, which covered most of Kern and San Luis Obispo Counties and part of Los Angeles County. Thomas was elected chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee in January 2001 and served until January 2007. During his chairmanship, Thomas guided the enactment of $2 trillion in tax relief, including the Economic Growth and Tax Reconciliation Act of 2001, which reduced all ordinary income tax rates; the Jobs and Growth Tax Reconciliation Act of 2003, which reduced the tax rate on dividends and capital gains; and the Job Creation Act of 2004, which provided significant reforms for corporate tax policy. Prior to his election as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Thomas served as chairman of the Ways and Means Health Subcommittee. He was also chairman of the House Administration Committee from 1995–2001. Before entering Congress, he was a faculty member at Bakersfield Community College and a member of the California State Assembly.
Alan D. Viard is a resident scholar at AEI. Prior to joining AEI, he was a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and an assistant professor of economics at Ohio State University. He has also worked for the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Analysis, the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, and the Joint Committee on Taxation of the U.S. Congress. Viard has written on a wide variety of tax and budget issues.
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