Mihir Mehta

Professor Mihir N. Mehta is an Assistant Professor of Accounting at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business. He received his PhD in Management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Prior to joining the University of Michigan, he was a Visiting Professor of Accounting at MIT and on the faculty at Temple University. 

Professor Mehta's research interests focus on the interactions between firms and their stakeholders, including politicians, auditors, and supply chain partners. His research has most recently been cited in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Yahoo! Finance, and L'Echo, and he is a contributor on WILS 1320 News Radio.

 His most recent research examines how firms can obtain a range of benefits as a result of links to politicians that serve on particular U.S. congressional committees. These benefits include political protection against enforcement and regulatory penalties following financial misconduct and favorable antitrust reviews of mergers and acquisitions.

His research examining audit client contagion, which is conditionally accepted at Contemporary Accounting Research, examines the implications when auditors lose or win major clients. The paper shows that after losing clients that are industry leaders, audit offices tend lose even more same-industry clients and auditors react to client shifts by adjusting audit fees. Furthermore, shocks to capacity constraints as a result of client switches have implications for the quality of services that auditors provide to their clients.

 Another of his papers, titled "Shadow Trading", was the recipient of the FMA 2014 Best Paper in Corporate Finance Award. The paper examines information transfers between firms and finds evidence that a firm’s insiders use their access to private information to facilitate trading in other related firms.

Professor Mehta currently teaches Corporate Financial Reporting in the Ross BBA program. He has been the recipient of multiple teaching awards. Most recently, he received the TUJ Executive MBA Professor of the Year award and the Fox Crystal Award for Teaching Excellence, and while in graduate school, was awarded the MIT Sloan Teaching Assistant of the Year award.

Prior to his PhD, Professor Mehta worked at Ernst & Young LLP in Sydney, Australia. He is married and is an Australian citizen.