Five Things Economists and Lawyers can Learn from Accountants: An Illustration Using the Domestic Production Activities Deduction‪.‬

INTRODUCTION Accounting is often referred to as the "language of business." In addition to providing a language, it is also akin to a translation program. The corporation uses accounting principles and rules to aggregate all of the year's transactions to a few tables of numbers; the stock analyst studies these few tables of numbers to understand the events and estimate the value of the corporation. When I speak to high school students about accounting as a profession, I relate my experience of enjoying word problems in fourth grade. If one were to place attorneys at the verbal end of the spectrum and economists at the quantitative end of the spectrum, accountants are in the middle, because they need facility in translating words to numbers and numbers to words.