Rebecca Lester

Associate Professor of Accounting, Stanford University

Rebecca Lester is an Associate Professor of Accounting and the Jonsson Family Faculty Scholar at Stanford Graduate School of Business. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Her research studies how tax policies affect corporate investment and employment decisions. In particular, she examines the role of reporting incentives, disclosure regimes, and information frictions in facilitating or altering the effectiveness of cross-border, federal, and local tax incentives. Her recent work explores national-level tax benefits, such as U.S. manufacturing tax incentives, European intellectual property tax regimes, and tax loss offsets. Other work examines state, local, and neighborhood-level incentives, including firm-specific tax incentives and the Opportunity Zones tax incentive. Professor Lester received her PhD in accounting from the MIT Sloan School of Management, and she has a BA and a Master of Accountancy from the University of Tennessee. Prior to her studies at MIT, she worked for eight years at Deloitte in Chicago, including five years in the M&A Transaction Services practice.