Are employees really assets?

Accounting Honours University Essay Are employees really ?assets?? If so, how do we value them? These questions have been surrounding accounting academics for decades. Over previous decades, the debate associated with them has produced a body of literature which attempts to answer these questions through introducing models on employee valuation. This is where the motivation of this paper comes from. The purpose of this paper is to also answer these questions but not by introducing a new model to add to the current bulk of them. Instead, this paper aims to provide original answers to these questions through providing a brief review of the past literature on the subject (from recent decades and from the Western world) and then by analysing it in-depth. Thus, the research of this paper is secondary in nature. In terms of structure, first, there is an examination of how employees can be viewed as assets. Secondly, there is a display of numerous models for accounting for employees as assets. Thirdly, there is an analysis of all previous material, which also answers the two questions above.