Publications

2014
Working Paper

Firm Competitiveness and Detection of Bribery

By: George Serafeim

Using survey data from firms around the world I analyze how detection of bribery has impacted a firm's competitiveness over the past year. Managers report that the most significant impact was on employee morale, followed by business relations, and then reputation and... View Details

Keywords: Competitiveness; Corruption; Bribery; Employee Engagement; Reputation; Regulation; Competition; Crime and Corruption; Ethics; Performance

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March 2022
Article

Revealing Corruption: Firm and Worker Level Evidence from Brazil

By: Emanuele Colonnelli, Spyridon Lagaras, Jacopo Ponticelli, Mounu Prem and Margarita Tsoutsoura

We study how the disclosure of corrupt practices affects the growth of firms involved in illegal interactions with the government using randomized audits of public procurement in Brazil. On average, firms exposed by the anti-corruption program grow larger after the... View Details

Keywords: Crime and Corruption; Corporate Disclosure; Business Growth and Maturation; Brazil

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July 2002 (Revised June 2003)
Case

Microsoft Financial History

By: William A. Sahlman

Contains background financial data on Microsoft as of mid-2001. View Details

Keywords: History; Analytics and Data Science; Crime and Corruption; Profit

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September 1986 (Revised February 1991)
Case

Graves Industries, Inc. (C): Consumer Hardware Division

Describes events occurring over a three-year period in a division of Graves Industries. The division is being squeezed for profit, and managers in the division get involved in some fraudulent financial reporting schemes involving revenues and capitalization of... View Details

Keywords: Earnings Management; Crime and Corruption; Ethics; Financial Reporting

2005
Working Paper

Letting Misconduct Slide: The Acceptability of Gradual Erosion in Others' Unethical Behavior

By: Francesca Gino and Max H. Bazerman

Four laboratory studies show that people are more likely to overlook others' unethical behavior when ethical degradation occurs slowly rather than in one abrupt shift. Participants served in the role of watchdogs charged with catching instances of cheating. The... View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Behavior; Crime and Corruption; Prejudice and Bias

April 2003
Article

The Role of Wages and Auditing during a Crackdown on Corruption in the City of Buenos Aires

By: Rafael Di Tella and Ernesto Schargrodsky

We study the prices paid for basic inputs during a crackdown on corruption in the public hospitals of the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, during 1996 97. We find a well-defined, negative effect on the measures used to capture corruption. Prices paid by hospitals for... View Details

Keywords: Crime and Corruption; Compensation and Benefits; Accounting Audits; Buenos Aires

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01 Mar 2004
News

Ex-Con Talks Ethics with HBS Students

official. He eventually turned himself in and served four years in prison in Costa Rica and the United States. Currently on probation, he spoke at HBS last November as part of the Leadership & Ethics Forum (LEF), a student-led organization. Kuhse’s descent into View Details

Keywords: Justice, Public Order, and Safety Activities; Government

March 2001
Case

Corruption in International Business (A)

By: Robert E. Kennedy and Rafael M. Di Tella

Explores various aspects of corruption in international business, in two sections. The first section provides a broad discussion of the ethical, business, and legal aspects of corruption. The second section provides a series of "caselets" that are designed to promote... View Details

Keywords: Crime and Corruption; Emerging Markets; Policy; Globalization

December 2017
Case

Charity or Bribery?

By: Eugene Soltes and Brian Tilley

Filip Kowalski, a senior manager at the pharmaceutical company Healthgen, leads sales for the firm’s Polish division. While pitching Healthgen’s products, he develops a relationship with a director of a regional health fund who also runs a private foundation. After a... View Details

Keywords: Bribery; Crime and Corruption; Law; Ethics; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; United States; Europe

September 1986 (Revised March 1987)
Case

Graves Industries, Inc. (B): Lohnes Marine Hardware Division

Describes events occurring over a four-year period in one division of Graves Industries. The division goes through a business cycle and uses several methods of managing earnings to meet its budget targets. The purpose of the case is to allow the exploration of the... View Details

Keywords: Earnings Management; Crime and Corruption; Ethics

Web

Timeline - Race, Gender & Equity

used as punishment for a crime 1662 Partus Sequitur Ventrem (or, literally, “offspring follows belly”) law ensures multigenerational bondage Jennifer Morgan, 'Partus Sequitur Ventrem’ Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery 1664... View Details

15 Aug 2024
Op-Ed

Post-CrowdStrike, Six Questions to Test Your Company's Operational Resilience

When cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike distributed a faulty software update in July, it impacted a staggering 8.5 million devices. The crisis rippled through commercial airline operations, package delivery logistics, ecommerce, and health care, to name a few. This... View Details

Keywords: by Hise Gibson and Anita Lynch

August 2019
Case

Creating Accountability in Afghanistan

By: Jonas Heese, Gerardo Pérez Cavazos, Eugene F. Soltes and Grace Liu

By early 2019, the United States had contributed $132 billion to the Afghan reconstruction. John Sopko, in his role as the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), was in charge of providing accountability for U.S. aid funding. Sopko’s oversight... View Details

Keywords: Auditing; Fraud; Accountability; Crime and Corruption; Law Enforcement; Governance; Infrastructure; Information; Networks; Strategy; Afghanistan

March 2018
Article

Polluted Morality: Air Pollution Predicts Criminal Activity and Unethical Behavior

By: Jackson G. Lu, Julia J. Lee, F. Gino and Adam D. Galinsky

Air pollution is a serious problem that influences billions of people globally. Although the health and environmental costs of air pollution are well known, the present research investigates its ethical costs. We propose that air pollution can increase criminal and... View Details

Keywords: Pollutants; Behavior; Moral Sensibility; Crime and Corruption

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October 2021 (Revised August 2022)
Exercise

Janet Ames (D)

By: Brian Trelstad

The final case in the series of Janet Ames looks at the challenges of managing a nonprofit and what to do in the instance of suspected fraud. View Details

Keywords: Nonprofit Organizations; Management; Crime and Corruption

March 2016
Article

An Analysis of Firms' Self-reported Anticorruption Efforts

By: Paul M. Healy and George Serafeim

We use Transparency International's ratings of self-reported anticorruption efforts for 480 corporations to analyze factors underlying the ratings. Our tests examine whether these forms of disclosure reflect firms' real efforts to combat corruption or are cheap talk.... View Details

Keywords: Corruption; Corporate Performance; Growth; Disclosure; Disclosure Strategy; Sustainability; Crime and Corruption; Corporate Disclosure; Performance; Sales

December 1995
Case

Assessing Foreign Business Practices

By: Debora L. Spar

As businesses expand worldwide, corporations are increasingly being forced to grapple with definitions of "acceptable" foreign conduct. What differentiates a "bribe" from a "commission"? Should managers abroad refer to local custom or their own national laws in... View Details

Keywords: Crime and Corruption; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues