Publication Type
Working Paper
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
9-2025
Abstract
This study examines how firm digitalization affects the demand for corporate accountants and their digital skills. Using more than 373,000 job posts for corporate accountants by U.S. non-technology firms between 2010 and 2019, we find that firm digitalization does not change the overall demand for financial specialists-accountants who are responsible for financial reporting, budgeting, and forecasting-but reduces the demand for financial clerks-accountants who primarily perform administrative financial tasks. We further show that firms digitalization increases the demand for digital skills among financial specialists, but not among financial clerks, and that such demand is greater than that for other employees within the same firms. We provide suggestive evidence that digital skills substitute for accounting skills among financial specialists in digitalized firms. Finally, we find that financial specialists with digital skills earn higher salaries than other financial specialists, but the wage premium for digital skills is lower for financial specialists than for other employees. Collectively, this paper provides the first large-scale empirical evidence on how firm digitalization affects the labor market for corporate accountants.
Keywords
digitalization, corporate accountants, digital skills, labor market
Discipline
Accounting
Research Areas
Corporate Reporting and Disclosure
Areas of Excellence
Digital transformation
First Page
1
Last Page
60
Publisher
SSRN
Citation
AWYONG, Amanda; CHENG, Qiang; DENG, Tian; and WANG, Rencheng.
Firm digitalization and accounting jobs. (2025). 1-60.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soa_research/2103
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5609412