A study from the University of Notre Dame has examined whether ethics training works
A major study of financial services professionals has examined whether ethics training really impacts behaviour.
Zachary Kowaleski, assistant professor of accountancy in the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, along with Andrew Sutherland from the MIT Sloan School of Management and Felix Vetter, a doctoral candidate at the London School of Economics; carried out the study of nearly 1.2 million investment advisers and financial representatives working at US broker-dealers.
Their study spanned 10 years and focused on a 2010 change in the investment advisor qualification exam which saw emphasis shift from rules and ethics (80% of the paper before the change, 50% after) to technical questions.
They found that those who completed the old paper were one-fourth less likely to commit misconduct including fraud, theft or deception. The study ensured comparison of those with similar current employers, locations, qualifications and experience, but who took different versions of the exam.
“Skeptics often criticize the lack of empirical evidence that shows ethics training works,” Kowaleski says. “A key barrier has been difficulty observing both training and subsequent behavior. We overcome this barrier by using a change to the ethics content on a qualification exam and an investment adviser’s record of misbehavior.”
Can ethics be taught? Study offers first large-sample evidence of the effect of ethics training on financial sector behavior https://t.co/0rNq5hlEx5 pic.twitter.com/k4x0xRFEZ5
— Notre Dame News (@nd_news) November 20, 2019
