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Abstract

The accounting industry in Denmark is facing some heavy problematics. One of these problematics is the difficulty of retaining the employees in the industry. Knowing this we decided to investigate if a well-known myth within the auditing industry is part of the reason for this development. This myth is the main topic of this master thesis. According to this myth it is possible for an accountant to get a higher salary in the industry based on seniority accumulated in an accounting firm. The aim of this master thesis is to investigate whether this myth is correct or incorrect based on a dataset given from Danmarks Statistik. In addition to this we try to figure out if there is incentive that tournament theory is not only delimited to within the individual company but is also acting across companies and industries.
The results found is based on both quantitative and qualitative research methods used to obtain our empirical data. We have interviewed six individuals who have worked or does work in the accounting industry and have access to a large dataset with information regarding companies and individuals related to the accounting industry.
To determine whether the myth is correct or incorrect, we created illustrations to show the trend of wages for individuals with a cand.merc.aud through a period of 13 years. This kind of illustrations was created in scenarios where the test groups had from one up to teen years of seniority from an accounting firm before they moved to a job in an industry different from accounting. We compared these different trends of wages to control groups matched using the entropy balancing method. To test the robustness of our analysis so far, we additionally made a multiple linear regressions analysis and a Wilcoxon signed rank test on our results.
The results of our analysis showed that for individuals with three, five and eight years of seniority from the accounting industry experienced a higher salary in industries different from the accounting industry.
Based on our findings we argue that tournaments in relations to tournament theory is not only delimited within the individual company but is also acting across companies and industries. From these results, the information gathered conducting interviews and from the tournament theory we try to explain and comment on the reasons why individuals opt out the accounting industry as a place to work.