Fraud at a Distance? How Remote Work Shapes Financial Misconduct

John Barrios, Jessie Jianwen Guo and Yanping Zhu

No 34417, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Financial misconduct is often a team activity, facilitated by face-to-face interactions, shared norms, and trust. We exploit the sudden shift to remote work during COVID-19 to examine how workplace organization shapes collusion and financial misconduct. Using a novel firm-level measure of work-from-home feasibility, we find that firms that are more able to operate remotely experienced large post-2020 declines in misconduct. This decline is found across multiple misreporting proxies and is robust to various alternative measures of remote work. Cross-sectional tests indicate stronger declines in teamwork-intensive firms, firms with effective internal controls, and firms with weaker pre-COVID employee perceptions of culture and leadership. Overall, our findings reflect that financial misconduct is a team activity, sensitive to the organizational structure of the firm, with important implications for governance and organizational design.

JEL-codes: D23 G30 G38 G39 J24 K22 M2 M4 M40 M41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-hrm and nep-lma
Note: CF LE LS PR
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34417.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34417

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34417
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().