Whitney Afonso
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Academic Fellows
The UNC Tax Academic Fellows are elite academic researchers. They are no strangers to the UNC Tax Center. Many of them received their PhDs from UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, and all of them have consistently contributed to the success of our longest running event, the UNC Tax Symposium, among other things. This group will continue to promote the Tax Center’s mission in numerous important ways. We are grateful for their commitment and welcome them as members of the extended UNC Tax Center family.
Whitney Afonso
Whitney Afonso is an Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Government. Whitney’s research focuses on state and local public finance with an emphasis on local sales taxes. Her work has appeared in journals such as the National Tax Journal, Public Budgeting & Finance, Public Finance Review, Public Administration Review, and the Journal of Public Policy. Whitney won the Burkhead Award for best manuscript published in Public Budgeting & Finance in 2015. She also has served on the executive committee of the Association for Budgeting and Financial Management since 2018.
In addition to her traditional research and teaching, her position at UNC engages her with elected officials and practitioners within the state. She is the liaison for the North Carolina Local Government Budget Association and collaborates and consults with the North Carolina General Assembly’s fiscal research staff on issues of tax policy.
Jennifer Blouin
University of Pennsylvania
Jennifer Blouin
Professor Jennifer Blouin’s research centers on the role of taxation in firm decision-making.
Professor Blouin studies taxation in many contexts, including capital structure, asset pricing, payout policy and multinational firm behavior. Professor Blouin’s research has been published in top-tier academic journals including Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, National Tax Journal and the Journal of the American Taxation Association. She has received funding from the Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research, the Global Initiatives Research Program and the International Tax Policy Forum. In addition, Professor Blouin is a 2009-2010 Golub Faculty Scholar.
Professor Blouin teaches taxation to undergraduate, MBA, and PhD students. She received her PhD in Accounting from the University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill and her BS from Indiana University – Bloomington.
Scott Dyreng
Duke University
Scott Dyreng
Scott Dyreng is a Professor of Accounting at Duke University. His research interests are in corporate tax avoidance, international taxation, and accounting for income taxes. He has published in The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Financial Economics, among others. He teaches managerial accounting to graduate students, and has received the Excellence in Teaching Award in the Duke MMS program three times. He received his PhD at the University of North Carolina in 2008. He holds Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in accounting from Brigham Young University.
Mary Margaret Frank
Dean, UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School and Professor of Accounting
Mary Margaret Frank
The academic interests of Dean Mary Margaret Frank include the integration of business principles and public policy objectives, cross-sector collaboration and leadership, and sustainable investing. These interests stem from her research on the effects of regulation – specifically tax, financial accounting, and patent reporting – on the strategy of corporate management, investors and entrepreneurs.
An award-winning teacher and researcher and academic leader, Dr. Frank was named dean of UNC Kenan-Flagler effective Aug. 15, 2023.
She is a Triple Tar Heel, an academic fellow at the UNC Tax Center and has taught in the Master of Accounting Program.
Dr. Frank returns to UNC Kenan-Flagler from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, where she was senior associate dean for faculty development, John Tyler Professor of Business Administration. She also was co-founder and academic director of the Institute for Business in Society. In that role she led the development of the P3 Impact Award, which recognizes leading cross-sector collaboration to improve communities around the world, in partnership with the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Global Partnerships and Concordia. Her passion for cross-sector collaboration also led her to establish the Tri-Sector Leadership Fellows program, which brings together graduate students from business, law and public policy.
She also served on the faculty of University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where she received its Phoenix Award in recognition of the faculty who, in addition to classroom responsibilities, has greatly enriched the learning experience of campus students.
Dr. Frank served as a board director and chairperson of the audit committee of a small publicly traded company, The Female Health Company, for 14 years, which merged with a biotech company in 2016 to become Veru Inc. The medical device company’s mission was to empower women, most of whom were from developing economies, to protect themselves against HIV and AIDS.
She practiced as a CPA and senior tax consultant for Arthur Andersen in Washington, D.C, before she returned to UNC Kenan-Flagler to enroll in the PhD Program in accounting. She received her PhD, Master of Accounting and BSBA from UNC Kenan-Flagler.
dean@kenan-flagler.unc.edu
UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School
John Graham
Duke University
John Graham
John Graham is the D. Richard Mead professor of finance at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. His past work experience includes teaching at the University of Utah and seven years working as a senior economist at Virginia Power. He has been co-editor of the Journal of Finance, associate editor of The Journal of Financial Economics The Journal of Finance, The Review of Financial Studies, Finance Research Letters, and Financial Management, and has served on the board of directors of the American Finance Association, the Western Finance Association, and the Financial Management Association, three of the largest academic finance professional organizations. Graham is currently President of the Financial Management Association and Vice President of the American Finance Association, and has been President of the Western Finance Association, is a Fellow of the Financial Management Association, and is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is multiple time winner of best teacher awards and also a recipient of the overall Outstanding Faculty award at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. Graham has served as area coordinator of Duke’s finance group and as co-director of the Duke Center for Financial Excellence.
Graham has published more than 50 articles and book chapters on corporate taxes, cost of capital, capital structure, financial reporting, and payout policy. His research has won numerous best paper awards. His teaching focuses on corporate finance, taxes, mergers and acquisitions, and corporate restructuring. His simulated corporate marginal tax rates are widely used and are an important input in the Duff and Phelps cost of capital publications.
Since 1997 Graham has been the director of the Global Business Outlook http://www.cfosurvey.org, a quarterly CFO survey that assesses the business climate and topical economic issues around the world. He appears regularly in the media to discuss the survey and corporate sector. Finally, Graham is lead author on the textbooks Corporate Finance: Linking Theory to What Companies Do (Cengage) and Introduction to Corporate Finance (Cengage).
Michelle Hanlon
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Michelle Hanlon
Michelle Hanlon is the Howard W. Johnson Professor and a Professor of Accounting at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Hanlon teaches a course on taxes and business strategy and she also often teaches an introductory financial accounting course. Her research focuses primarily on the intersection of taxation and financial accounting. Hanlon’s recent work examines the capital market and reputational effects of corporate tax avoidance, the economic consequences of U.S. international tax policies for multinational corporations, the effect of individual level taxes on corporate payout policy, and the extent of individual-level offshore tax evasion. She is an editor at one of the leading accounting research journals. She has won several awards for her research and is the winner of the 2013 Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching at Sloan.
She has co-authored two textbooks: Financial Accounting (Cambridge Business Publishers) and Taxes and Business Strategy (Pearson Education Inc.). 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. She recently worked as an Academic Fellow for the U.S.House Ways and Means (majority) tax staff.
Professor Hanlon holds a BBA from Eastern Illinois University, an MAcc in taxation from the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and a PhD in accounting from the University of Washington.
Leslie Robinson
Dartmouth College
Leslie Robinson
Leslie Robinson teaches financial accounting in the MBA and Business Bridge programs. She is among Poets and Quants’ 40 best business school professors under the age of 40. Her research interests include the interaction of tax and accounting policy, and her expertise centers on the tax and accounting issues associated with multinational operations.
Jake Thornock
Brigham Young University
Jake Thornock
Professor Thornock is an associate professor of accounting in the Marriott School of Management at BYU and holds the Distinguished EY Fellowship. He recently joined BYU from the University of Washington, where he was a tenured associate professor of accounting and the PwC Faculty Fellow. At UW, he won numerous awards, including the Smith Award for excellence in research, and the Crockett Award and Fowler Award for educational innovation at UW. He also received a research prize from the Chicago Quantitative Alliance.
Jake has diverse research interests, including interest in taxation, tax havens, earnings information content and information technologies. His research has been accepted for publication at the Journal of Accounting & Economics, Journal of Accounting Research, The Accounting Review, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Contemporary Accounting Research, Review of Accounting Studies, Management Science and Financial Management. Jake’s research has been cited or featured in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Business Week, Bloomberg, Fox News, and NPR, and has been presented at the IRS, the SEC and a congressional subcommittee.
Professor Thornock completed his doctoral studies at Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina,where he was awarded the William Delozier Fellowship for Outstanding Doctoral Student. He earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees in accounting at BYU. In practice, he worked as a financial advisor for a regional brokerage firm and as a tax accountant. He has also consulted for a large financial company and a small tech startup.