Associate Professor of Accounting

Stanford University Graduate School of Business

Rebecca Lester is an Associate Professor of Accounting (with tenure) at the 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.

Professor Lester’s research studies how tax policies affect corporate investment and employment decisions. In particular, she demonstrates the critical role of reporting incentives, disclosure regimes, and information frictions in facilitating or altering the effectiveness of cross-border, federal, and local tax incentives.

Professor Lester’s research has been published in leading accounting and finance academic journals, and she has been invited to present her work at forums including the National Bureau of Economic Research, the U.S. Treasury, the U.S. Federal Reserve, and the OECD Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes. Her work has been cited by the U.S. Joint Committee on Taxation and featured in The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Bloomberg, and The Huffington Post. She was selected as one of Poets and Quants “40 Best Business Professors Under 40” in 2018 and received the Stanford MBA Distinguished Teaching Award in 2021.

Professor Lester received her PhD in Accounting from the MIT Sloan School of Management. She has a B.A. and a Masters of Accountancy from the University of Tennessee, where she studied on a full four-year academic scholarship. 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. She is originally from Greensboro, NC and currently resides in Palo Alto, CA with her husband Ben and their daughter Catherine.