Prof. Robert Knechel is the Frederick E. Fisher Scholar Chair, Distinguished Professor, and Director of the International Accounting and Auditing Center at University of Florida. His research interests include assurance, control, performance measurement, and auditing.

His work has been published extensively in top accounting journals, including The Accounting Review, Journal of Accounting Research, Management Science, Contemporary Accounting Research, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory. His work significantly influences both academic research and practice. He previously served as Editor of The Accounting Review (2017-2020),  Senior Editor of The Accounting Review (2020-2023). Additionally, he has served on PCAOB advisory groups, including the Standing Advisory Group (2017-2019) and the Standards and Emerging Issues Advisory Group (2022-2024).

Abstract: The accounting profession has long attracted people seeking secure careers, but we hypothesize that fear of job-replacing disruption has, in recent years, made accounting less attractive to students sensitive about job security. Using exposure to contemporaneous mass layoffs in a student’s hometown as a shock to the salience of job security, we first show that layoff exposed college freshmen were more likely to choose accounting during the 1990s but became less likely in the 2000s. This pattern is stronger when layoffs are attributable to automation. The long-run perception of job security in the accounting profession likely depends, in part, on the extent to which it adapts. To test this, we next measure the extent to which accounting curricula have adapted to technological change using course catalogs from a large sample of U.S. universities from 2009 2020. We show that accounting curricula have been slower to incorporate instruction about new technologies than other business disciplines and that attrition among accounting majors is significantly attenuated in universities where accounting courses better adapt to emerging technologies. Together, we show that 1) the accounting profession’s place in the competition for high quality human capital is threatened by the perception that it is especially vulnerable to labor replacing automation, but 2) this threat is sharply attenuated when accounting courses adapt to cover emerging technologies.

Please contact Jun Nguyen (jun.nguyen@nhh.no) if you would like to meet the speaker.