Abstract
This study examines the shareholder wealth effects of specific unethical conduct involving bribery, illegal payments, employee discrimination, environmental pollution, and insider trading based on announcements in theWall Street Journal. It is hypothesized that the high costs of such reported acts would result in a negative shareholder wealth effect because of increases in monitoring costs and risks to stakeholders of the firm. The results show that the significantly negative abnormal returns were not short-term, but were persistent and cumulative for approximately one month following the announcement of unethical business conduct. Therefore, contrary to some earlier studies, unethical business behavior, as defined in this study, is not compatible with the goal of shareholder wealth maximization.
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Long, D.M., Rao, S. The wealth effects of unethical business behavior. J Econ Finan 19, 65–73 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02920510
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02920510