Who Pays for White-Collar Crime?

Paul  Healy; George  Serafeim

Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2016

Who Pays for White-Collar Crime?

Abstract

Using a proprietary dataset of 667 companies around the world that experienced white-collar crime, we investigate what drives punishment of perpetrators of crime. We find a significantly lower propensity to punish crime in our sample, where most crimes are not reported to the regulator, relative to samples in studies investigating punishment of perpetrators in cases investigated by U.S. regulatory authorities. Punishment severity is significantly lower for senior executives, for perpetrators of crimes that do not directly steal from the company, and at smaller companies. While economic reasons could explain these associations, we show that gender and frequency of crimes moderate the relation between punishment severity and seniority. Male senior executives and senior executives in organizations with widespread crime are treated more leniently compared to senior female perpetrators or compared to senior perpetrators in organizations with isolated cases of crime. These results suggest that agency problems could partly explain punishment severity.

Keywords: crime; Crime and Corruption; gender; Gender bias; women; women executives; corruption; legal aspects of business; firing; human capital; human resource management; corporate governance; Prejudice and Bias; Crime and Corruption; Judgments; Law Enforcement; Human Resources; Corporate Governance; Gender;

Language: English

Format: Print

50 pages

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Citation:

Healy, Paul, and George Serafeim. "Who Pays for White-Collar Crime?" Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 16-148, June 2016.

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Who Pays for White-Collar Crime?

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