Brian Mayhew

Brian W. Mayhew is the Arthur Andersen Alumni Professor in the Department of Accounting and Information Systems at the Wisconsin School of Business. He currently also serves as the Associate Dean of the Undergraduate Program

Mayhew's research focuses primarily on financial statement audits and financial reporting. His research uses both experimental economics and archival data to develop and test theories related to auditing and financial reporting. He is particularly interested in institutional design factors that impact audit quality. Research topics include: audit quality, auditor independence, related party transactions, auditor industry specialization, audit market concentration, and ethics. He teaches Advanced Auditing to Master's of Accounting Students and research to Ph.D. students.

Mayhew has published in journals such as The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, Contemporary Accounting Research, and Auditing. He has served as an associate editor for Accounting Horizons and the Journal of Accounting Literature and serves on the editorial boards for Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory, and The Accounting Review.

Mayhew was the inaugural director of the BRITE Lab – a joint venture between WSB and the School of Human Ecology. The lab focuses on experimental research that explores how incentives, psychology and sociology interact to affect individual decision making. The lab also fosters cross campus interactions with a wide range of social science departments. He currently leads the Arthur Andersen Center which supports research and student development in the accounting department.

He joined the Wisconsin School of Business in 1999 after working as an assistant professor at Georgia State University. He previously worked as an auditor with Coopers & Lybrand, which became PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

He received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in accounting, with a minor in experimental economics. He received his BBA in accounting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.