Brian Hall is an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. He spent four years as an assistant professor of economics in the Harvard Economics Department. Professor Hall received his BA, MA, and PhD in economics from Harvard and holds an MPhil in economics from Cambridge University. He was on the staff of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in 1990-91.

Professor Hall teaches and researches in the area of compensation and incentive strategy, corporate governance, corporate finance, and organizational economics. He teaches a second-year elective course in the Harvard MBA program called Coordination, Control and the Management of Organizations: Incentives ("CCMO: Incentives"). He also teaches a first-year MBA foundations course called Economics of Markets and modules on stock options in various executive-education programs. He has also taught various courses on economics and corporate finance.

Professor Hall’s research is in the area of executive compensation and incentives, with a focus on the optimal design and incentive effects of stock option plans. He has published widely and in a variety of academic journals, including the American Economic Review and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. He has also published in practitioner-oriented journals, including the Journal of Applied Corporate Finance ("The Design Of Multi-Year Stock Option Plans," 1999) and the Harvard Business Review ("What You Need To Know About Stock Options," 2000). His research has been cited frequently in the national and international financial press (including features in BusinessWeek and Red Herring), and he has been the featured speaker at numerous conferences and symposia. He has appeared on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer on the topic of stock options.

Professor Hall has received several teaching prizes, including the Harvard collegewide 1997 Phi Beta Kappa Prize for excellence in teaching. He is currently a member of the Global Corporate Governance Initiative and the Human Resource Initiative at Harvard Business School. Professor Hall is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and is the Berol Faculty Fellow at Harvard Business School. He has consulted with or advised many companies in the area of stock option and incentive strategy, including startups, large corporations (Merck, Safelite), consulting firms (McKinsey, Towers Perrin, Stern Stewart, iQuantic), and financial services firms.

Professor Hall is married to Kay Hall, an Associate Director of Alumni Relations at the Harvard Alumni Association. They live in Belmont, Massachusetts, with their two children, Joseph and Roger.