Speakers

Mihir A. Desai is a Professor of Business Administration 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.

Within international corporate finance, he has investigated how the globalization of firm operations provides a laboratory for financial decisions making and how multinational firms make critical financial decisions. Within public finance, his research has emphasized the effects of taxation on the export, financing, organizational form, and investment decisions of firms facing multiple tax regimes.

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 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2006) which features his many case studies on international corporate finance.

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.

Tsedal Neeley is an Assistant Professor in the Organizational Behavior area at Harvard Business School. Professor Neeley's research focuses on the challenges that international collaborators face when attempting to coordinate work across national and linguistic boundaries, with special emphasis in the impact of language on social dynamics. In particular, she examines the effects of internationalizing firms' policies requiring employees of diverse skill-set to adopt English as their common business language, or lingua franca. In addition to lingua franca adoption behaviors, she studies the influence of cross-cultural intelligence in heterogeneous work environments.

Before her academic career, Professor Neeley spent ten years in industry working for companies like Lucent Technologies and The Forum Corporation in various capacities including strategies for global customer experience, 360 degree performance software management systems, sales force/sales management development, and business flow analysis for telecommunication infrastructures. With extensive international experience, Professor Neeley is fluent in four languages.

Professor Neeley received her Ph.D. from Stanford University's Department of Management Science and Engineering specializing in Organizational Studies. Professor Neeley was a Stanford University School of Engineering Lieberman award recipient for excellence in teaching and research.

Anna Milanez is a third-year doctoral student in the Business Economics joint doctoral program between the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Department of Economics. Prior to joining HBS, Anna graduated from Bryn Mawr College and majored in economics and math. She was a researcher at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and in Global Investment Research at Goldman Sachs.

Anna's research interests are corporate finance, labor and behavioral finance.