We examine the staggered adoption of additional educational requirements (“150‐hour rule”) for Certified Public Accountants (“CPAs”) to understand the effects of occupational licensing on minority participation in professional labor markets. The 150‐hour rule increased the educational requirement for CPAs from 120 to 150 credit hours, effectively adding a fifth year of study. We find a 13% greater entry decline following the requirement's enactment for minority than nonminority CPA candidates. Our analyses of parental income and financial aid availability point to a socioeconomic status channel explaining the differential entry declines. Studying exam passing patterns, professional misconduct, and job postings we find a deterioration, or at best, no change in CPA quality following enactment.

Using a dataset covering 3 million commercial borrower financial statements, we document a substantial, nearly monotonic decline in banks’ use of attested financial statements (AFS) in lending over the past two decades. Two market forces help explain this trend. First, technological advances provide lenders with access to a growing array of borrower information sources that can substitute for AFS. Second, banks are increasingly competing with nonbank lenders that rely less on AFS in screening and monitoring. Our results illustrate how technology adoption and changes in credit market structure can render AFS less efficient than alternative information sources for screening and monitoring.

Compliance-driven investments in technology—or “RegTech”—are growing rapidly. To understand the effects on the financial sector, we study firms’ responses to new internal control requirements. Affected firms make significant investments in ERP and hardware. These expenditures then enable complementary investments that are leveraged for noncompliance purposes, leading to modest savings from avoided customer complaints and misconduct. IT budgets rise and profits fall, especially at small firms, and acquisition activity and market concentration increase. Our results illustrate how regulation can directly and indirectly affect technology adoption, which in turn affects noncompliance functions and market structure.

We study the influence of supervisors on employee misconduct at branches of U.S. financial institutions. Individual supervisor fixed effects explain twice as much variation in branch misconduct as firm fixed effects. Supervisor influence is concentrated in firms that theory suggests are most likely to delegate authority—firms with complex operations, distant branches, and trustworthy supervisors. Supervisors affect misconduct through their personnel decisions, attention to employees with past misbehavior, and ethics and industry rules training. After major internal control improvements, supervisor influence declines. Our results illustrate how supervisors influence misconduct above and beyond firm-level factors. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.