Rebecca Lester joined the Stanford Graduate School of Business as an Assistant Professor of Accounting in July 2015. She studies the effects of accounting rules and tax policies on domestic and multinational firm investment and employment decisions. Her recent work has examined how firms have responded to a U.S. manufacturing tax incentive that was intended to increase domestic investment and employment. Other work examines how U.S. tax rules previously encouraged firms to reinvest offshore and borrow domestically rather than repatriate cash to the U.S.

Professor Lester received her PhD in Accounting from the MIT Sloan School of Management and both a B.A. and Masters of Accountancy from the University of Tennessee. Prior to her studies at MIT, she was a Manager in the M&A Transaction Services practice of Deloitte in Chicago, Illinois.