Professor Terry Shevlin joined UCI in the summer of 2012 after 26 years at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is from Australia and became interested in tax when pursuing his PhD at Stanford University. He teaches MPAc 232 Taxes and Business Strategy in Fall quarter and serves as the Faculty Director of the MPAc Program for academic year 2022-2023.
What are your research interests and why you are passionate about this topic? I have broad research interests but for the last 15 years they have mostly been in the realm of corporate taxation. The U.S. and other governments are continually changing the tax code leading to opportunities to conduct research examining the effect of such changes. I like the intellectual challenge of problem solving and trying to develop hypotheses predicting firms’ responses and designing tests to examine tax rule changes. I discuss my research findings in the MPAC tax class.
What advice do you have for incoming students? Specific to my Fall tax class, carefully read the syllabus noting that there is required homework to be uploaded to the canvas website BEFORE class 1. More generally take advantage of being in the MPAc program by networking with as many of your fellow students as possible: you will learn from them, new friendships will develop and you will build your list of contacts for later in your career.
Who has influenced you the most in life? 3 faculty members: Bob Officer at Monash University who supervised my Masters Thesis and upon its completion suggested it was time for me to move to the U.S. to earn a PhD in Accounting (yes there is such a thing). Bill Beaver and George Foster both at Stanford University. Bill taught a rigorous PhD class in capital markets research in accounting and George was my PhD thesis adviser and mentor.
Fun fact: I grew up in a very small country town in Victoria, Australia (Murtoa) – by small I mean 1,000 residents in the middle of very flat very dry wheat farming country. There were 12 students in my high school graduating class. Before coming to the U.S. I played Australian Rules Football at the second top level and was paid (but not much). I have two wonderful grandchildren and my daughter just got married this past June.