Financial statement fraud generates many negative effects, including reducing people’s willingness to participate in the stock market. If it also stigmatizes accounting, it may similarly adversely affect the quantity and quality of workers willing to become accountants, thereby potentially...

We use experimental and archival evidence to show that people who had low socioeconomic status (SES) as children participate in the U.S. accounting labor market in distinctive and consequential ways. Drawing on life history theory, we predict and show that low SES individuals select into...