This paper aims to provide a high-level overview of whether and how ethics is taught in Romanian accounting and business faculties, members of the Association of Economics Faculties of Romania (AFER), at Bachelor or Masters’ level (accounting, audit or business administration programs). While there are numerous research papers on how ethics is taught in general and some national surveys in other countries, this is the first analysis of its kind in Romania and it can be helpful for faculties to compare themselves to what their counterparts are doing to teach this important topic for professionals in accounting and business. We analysed the publicly available (detailed and most recent) curricula of 60 programs (22 bachelor and 38 masters) from 14 faculties in 8 Romanian cities. We found out whether ethics is included as a self-standing course or ingrained in the curricula (based on our own hypothesis which we then verified) and whether it is predominantly an optional or a mandatory discipline. We found that, with a few exceptions, the majority of programs analyzed approached ethics (academic or professional) and that the Ethics self-standing courses (or the courses where ethics is included as a secondary subject) have a relatively high importance (judged from the number of credits allocated to them). There are many other variables to analyze in order to make the research more relevant for professors that would want to update their ethics curricula. One would be for instance to analyze whether currently ethics is taught more towards senior years or at the beginning of students’ education.

Research Question: How do accounting versus non-accounting Romanian students perceive the factors influencing the construction of the ethical self? Motivation: The answer is important in the context of accountants’ ethics being increasingly under scruity following corporate scandals. Probably because in Romania we do not have the same context, prior research on accounting ethics is scarce, so little is known about how various educational aspects impact skills and behavior. Idea: In this study we offer insights about the academic ethics education in Romania and discuss its complexity, usefulness and effectiveness. To this purpose, we involve the Romanian end-users of the academic accounting ethics education (the students) to ask for their perception regarding the role education plays in developing the ethical self. Data: We survey 413 students from five Romanian universities. Tools: We conduct descriptive statistics, cross-sectional analysis and regression analysis on the data from the survey and we mobilize an institutional-based theoretical framework (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983) to discuss the factors associated with the construction of the ethical self. Findings: Our results indicate that while all isomorphic pressures are present in the creation of the ethical self, the most important factors appear to be the coercive (from classes on ethics) and mimetic ones (resulting from the need to follow immediate proxies such as classmates, professors, and the profession), and to a lesser extent the normative ones. Contribution: Understanding students’ perception of their ethics education will help both academia and professional associations adapt their style of teaching ethics so that it becomes more effective and applicable to the users.

This article aims to find out the degree to which selected professional associations across the globe publicly share their exams’ preparatory materials, whether ethics features in these materials and whether the degree of transparency and how much ethics is featured in their curricula are somehow linked to their size (and hence availability of resources). The selection of associations includes the largest IFAC member bodies from the worlds’ most populous countries and the largest non-merged international accountancy association, ACCA for comparison as well as the Romanian accountancy body, CECCAR due to their origins. This article is part of a much wider research through which I attempt to give a 360-degree view of ethics education in the accounting profession to then reach the conclusion of whether its stakeholders feel that it is sufficient, relevant and enforceable. This will give a starting point for educators of ethics in accounting to adapt their teaching as they see fit. Already I have looked at how ethics is included in Romanian economic faculties’ curricula (through desktop-review of curricula content, interviews with professors and questionnaires with students) and will enhance this current research by further looking into how ethics is taught, examined and implemented in professional accounting associations’ Initial and Continuous Professional Development programs. The conclusions of this research were that there was a large variation between associations in how transparently they publicly published exam preparation materials and also whether ethics was featured. The transparency and inclusion of ethics was not linked to the size of the associations.