Is fraud contagious? Coworker influence on misconduct by financial advisors

• Main Authors: Dimmock, Stephen G., Gerken, William C., Graham, Nathaniel P.
• Other Authors: Nanyang Business School
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: Financial Misconduct; DRNTU::Business::Finance; Financial Advisors
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/102643; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/47774
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Using a novel data set of U.S. fi nancial advisors that includes individuals' employment histories and misconduct records, we show that co-workers influence an individual's propensity to commit financial misconduct. We identify co-workers' effect on misconduct using changes in co-workers caused by mergers of financial advisory firms. The tests include merger-fi rm fixed effects to exploit the variation in changes to co-workers across branches of the same fi rm. The probability of an advisor committing misconduct increases if his new co-workers, encountered in the merger, have a history of misconduct. This effect is stronger between demographically similar co-workers.