Abstract ABSTRACT: Recently, several state legislators have supported the imposition of a mandatory five-year accounting education requirement for entrance into the public accounting profession. This has occurred despite controversy over the efficacy of such a proposal. This paper explores the economic incentives of accounting labor suppliers in providing an extra year of accounting education, and evaluates the ramifications of an imposed five-year minimum education requirement upon the accounting labor market. Education will be presented as a quality signal from which potential employers can predict employee productivity in markets characterized by information asymmetry.
Rosen et al. (Fri,) studied this question.