Trung Nguyen is an assistant professor of business administration in the Accounting & Management Unit. She teaches the Financial Reporting and Control course in the MBA required curriculum.
Professor Nguyen’s research interests include financial misconduct, government regulation and enforcement, corporate governance, and behavioral biases in financial markets. More specifically, she studies the relationship between financial regulatory and enforcement agencies’ behavior and financial fraud. In addition, her research explores the effects of financial fraud and accounting violations disclosure on investors’ corporate governance efforts and investment choices. She also studies the incentives for and determinants of private information disclosure by managers. Professor Nguyen’s work has been featured in Bloomberg.
Professor Nguyen earned a Ph.D. in business administration from Stanford University, Graduate School of Business and a B.A. in economics from Harvard University.
We use hand-collected data from SEC’s litigation releases for insider trading violations to examine the effect of geographic distance on its enforcement activities and insider trading activities. First, we find that the SEC is more likely to investigate companies that are closer to its offices. Second, we find that illegal insider trading increases with a company’s distance from an SEC office. Lastly, we utilize the closure of SEC offices as exogenous shocks to geographic proximity and find that insider trading at nearby companies increase significantly compared with trading at otherwise similar companies not affected by the closures.
This paper studies the deterrent effect of criminal enforcement on white-collar criminal activities. Using the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a shock to the FBI’s allocation of investigative resources and priorities, and variations in the Muslim population in the United States as a measure of geographic variations in the shock, I examine two questions: (1) Does the bureau’s shift to counter-terrorism investigations after 9/11 lead to a reduction in the enforcement of laws targeting white-collar crime? (2) Does white-collar crime increase as a result of less oversight? Using a difference-in-differences estimation approach, I find that there is a significantly greater reduction in white-collar criminal cases referred by FBI field offices that shift their investigative focus away from white-collar crime to counter-terrorism. I also find that areas overseen by FBI field offices that shift their attention from white-collar crime to counter-terrorism experience a significantly greater increase in wire fraud, illegal insider trading activities, and fraud within financial institutions.
