Dr. Hirst is the King Ranch Chair for Business Leadership at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin and the fromer Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. On faculty at UT since 1991, he teaches the MBA core course in financial reporting and an elective course in financial statement analysis. He also leads McCombs Global Connections courses to destinations around the world. Prior to his work in academe, he worked as a public accountant with KMG-Thorne Riddell in Toronto, where his clients were in the mining and entertainment industries. His research centers on the role of financial reporting in investor and professional analyst judgment and decision making.

Professor Hirst has been recognized for Teaching Excellence at UT Austin, INSEAD, and the Texas Executive MBA at Mexico City. He was awarded the American Accounting Association’s 2011 “Distinguished Contribution to Accounting Literature Award”, the AAA Auditing Section’s “Notable Contributions to The Auditing Literature Award” for 2000-2001 and received the AAA Financial Reporting Section’s 1999 “Best Paper Award.” Dr. Hirst has developed and taught programs for executives in Asia, Europe and throughout the Americas for KPMG, Dow Chemical, 3M, Texas Instruments, USAA, Motorola, Freescale Semiconductor, Polycom, Samsung, Repsol, and other major companies. From 2001 to 2004 he served on the American Accounting Association’s Financial Accounting Standards Committee (chairing the group in 2003-2004), a committee responsible for writing comment letters on new accounting standards to the FASB and IASB.

Eric’s work appears in scholarly journals including Journal of Accounting Research, The Accounting Review, Contemporary Accounting Research, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. His monograph, Earnings: Measurement, Disclosure and the Impact on Equity Valuation, was distributed to over 32,000 members of the Association for Investment Management and Research. He is co-author of two widely used textbooks, Cases in Financial Accounting and Financial Reporting for Managers: A Value Creation Perspective.