About this item:

144 Views | 109 Downloads

Author Notes:

Correspondence: john.griffin@utexas.edu

J.M.G., S.K., and G.M. designed research, performed research, analyzed data, and wrote the paper.

We thank Paul Gendreau, Shane Johnson, Stefan Lewellen, Joseph Stover, Ivo Welch, and Luigi Zingales; as well as seminar participants at the American Finance Association Annual Meeting.

We also thank the Catholic University of Chile, the Lone Star Finance Conference, the Wake Forest Corporate Social Responsibility Conference, the Center for Accounting Research and Education Conference, the Midwest Finance Association Annual Meeting, the SEC, and the University of Texas at Austin for helpful comments.

Mark Albin, Vedant Batra, Esha Dewan, Akshat Gautam, Melissa Hall, Ziqian Ju, Cliffe Kim, Jangwoo Lee, Murray Lee, Marc Luettecke, Felix Olazaran, Kush Patel, Nicolas Savignon, Surya Raviillu, and Daniel Smarda provided excellent research assistance.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Subjects:

Research Funding:

We are grateful for research support from the McCombs Research Excellence Grant and to Integra FEC LLC for providing LexisNexis access and research support.

Keywords:

  • Science & Technology
  • Multidisciplinary Sciences
  • Science & Technology - Other Topics
  • police
  • financial advisors
  • CEOs
  • fraud
  • personal conduct
  • Ethical decision making
  • Corporate
  • Culture
  • Overconfidence
  • Executives
  • Religion

Personal infidelity and professional conduct in 4 settings

Tools:

Journal Title:

PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America)

Volume:

Volume 116, Number 33

Publisher:

, Pages 16268-16273

Type of Work:

Article | Final Publisher PDF

Abstract:

We study the connection between personal and professional behavior by introducing usage of a marital infidelity website as a measure of personal conduct. Police officers and financial advisors who use the infidelity website are significantly more likely to engage in professional misconduct. Results are similar for US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) defendants accused of white-collar crimes, and companies with chief executive officers (CEOs) or chief financial officers (CFOs) who use the website are more than twice as likely to engage in corporate misconduct. The relation is not explained by a wide range of regional, firm, executive, and cultural variables. These findings suggest that personal and workplace behavior are closely related.

Copyright information:

© 2019 the Author(s).

This is an Open Access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Export to EndNote