Michelle Hanlon is the Howard W. Johnson Professor, a Professor of Accounting, and Deputy Dean for Faculty and Research at the MIT Sloan School of Management

Hanlon’s primary teaching at Sloan is the Taxes and Business Strategy class. She has won the Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching, the MIT Sloan MBA Outstanding Teaching Award, and the MIT Teaching with Digital Technology Award.  She has also taught introductory and intermediate financial accounting during her career.

Her research focuses primarily on taxation and the intersection of taxation and financial accounting. Much of her research examines corporate taxation and decision making, the effect of taxes on mergers and acquisitions, corporate tax avoidance and the reputational effects of tax avoidance, the economic consequences of U.S. international tax policies, book-tax conformity, and other topics.  She has won numerous awards for her research including the Distinguished Contribution to the Accounting Literature Award from the American Accounting Association, the Outstanding Manuscript Award from the American Taxation Association (three times), and being named a Presidential Scholar of the American Accounting Association.

Hanlon served as an editor at one of the leading accounting research journals for fifteen years. She is a coauthor on three textbooks: 1) Financial Accounting, 2) Taxes and Business Strategy, and 3) Intermediate Accounting (all published by Cambridge Business Publishers).

 Hanlon has testified in front of the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance and the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means regarding U.S. tax policy (twice to both committees). She worked as an Academic Fellow for the U.S. House Ways and Means (majority) tax staff (2015).

 Hanlon holds a BBA from Eastern Illinois University, an MAcc from the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and a PhD from the University of Washington.