Corporate In-house Human Capital Investments in Accounting

Abstract

In this study, we provide large-sample evidence on how corporate in-house human capital investments in accounting affect earnings management. We construct a dataset of more than 411,000 individual-years of corporate accountants between 2009 and 2015 and measure firms’ accounting human capital using the proportion of their accountants with Big N work experience or a CPA designation. We find that firms with higher accounting human capital have a lower probability of accounting irregularities, lower discretionary accruals, better internal control quality, and fewer unintentional accounting errors. The results hold when we control for potential endogeneity by using the staggered adoption of the CPA mobility law and the number of top accounting undergraduate programs near the firm as instrumental variables for accounting human capital. We further find that firms with higher accounting human capital exhibit stronger market reactions to earnings news and pay lower audit fees, confirming that external stakeholders perceive these firms as having better financial reporting quality.