S. P. Kothari

Prof. S.P. Kothari
Born	India
Nationality	American
Education	BITS, Pilani IIM, Ahmedabad University of Iowa
Title	Gordon Y Billard Professor of Accounting and Finance
Honours	Padma Shri (2020)

Professor S. P. Kothari is an Indian-American academic and the Gordon Y Billard Professor of Accounting and Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a Padma Shree awardee. His field of research is strategic and policy issues, securities regulation, auditing, and corporate governance.

Professor Kothari has senior executive experience in government, academia, and industry. Most recently, he served as Chief Economist and Director of the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis at the US Securities and Exchange Commission from 2019 to 2021. Kothari led 160 economists and data scientists focused on US securities regulation, domestic and international prudential regulation, and data analytics.

In academia, Kothari was deputy dean of MIT Sloan School of Management (2010-15), and previously he headed the Department of Economics, Finance and Accounting at MIT. In addition, he Co-Chaired the Board of Governors of Asia School of Business, Kuala Lumpur, served as faculty director of the MIT-India Program, and edited the world-renowned academic publication Journal of Accounting & Economics. Kothari has also taught at Harvard Business School, London Business School, and the University of Rochester.

From 2015-2019, Kothari served as a director of Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE). During this time, he was actively engaged in many strategic decisions such as the public listing of BSE, the launch of India’s first international exchange (INX), and the expansion of the mutual fund trading platform. In January 2021, Kothari rejoined the board of Velan Studios where he was a founding director from 2016-2019. Velan Studios is a technology and design company specializing in video gameplay experiences with products like Mario Kart Live. Kothari also serves on the boards of EIC, a provider of breakthrough technology for energy storage and gas compression, and Aveta Biomics, a head-and-neck cancer drug development firm.

Throughout his career, Kothari has consulted extensively on valuation and reporting, risk management, auditing, and management compensation with many large corporations, including leading US and international banks, the U.S. Department of Justice, Goldman Sachs, Australian television broadcast corporations, US steel companies, E&Y, KPMG, and PwC. He is an expert on economic policy issues and has written numerous opinion-page editorials in The Wall Street Journal, The Economic Times, The Hindu Business Line, etc.

Professor Kothari is a recipient of numerous awards for his scholarship, including India’s Padma Shri award in 2020, Honorary Doctorates from London Business School in 2019, University of Cyprus in 2016, and University of Technology, Sydney, in 2013, and American Accounting Association’s Distinguished Contributions to the Accounting Literature award in 2019.

He earned his B.E. in Chemical Engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, his M.B.A. from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, and his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa.

External links

• MIT Sloan faculty page
• Faculty page at MIT
• SEC Bio
• S. P. Kothari publications indexed by Google Scholar