Bio
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 respond to certain national-level tax rate incentives, such as those related to U.S. manufacturing and those for European intellectual property income. Additional work examines state, local and neighborhood-level incentives, including firm-specific tax subsidies and the recent Opportunity Zones tax incentive, as well as the role of tax net operating losses in both corporate investment and cash holdings decisions.
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.