Building and Maintaining Ethical Culture in Business

Written by Debra Shapiro
Corporate malfeasance wreaks devastating losses (e.g., job-loss, loss of health care, loss of career-long savings, and more) for countless victims, which include consumers and investors in addition to corporations’ employees. This was vividly demonstrated by the collapse of Enron, Worldcom, Arthur Andersen, and Theranos, among others, after fraudulent practices by these corporations’ employees got exposed. Understanding how to prevent employees from behaving unethically is thus a matter of, both, practical and theoretical importance.

Using Artificial Intelligence to Study Corruption (I): Academic and Non-Governmental Organization Research

Written by Jonathan J. Rusch
Corruption has long presented a challenge for scholars in multiple fields because the term itself is inherently protean.  Depending on the purpose for which it is defined, it can be considered normative or descriptive, and cover an exceptionally broad spectrum of behaviors ranging from any abuse of entrusted power for private gain to specific crimes such as bribery of domestic and foreign officials.   In general, it would seem, as Professor Dan Hough of the University of Sussex has acknowledged, that “finding agreement on what is and isn’t corrupt will be virtually impossible.” […]

Everybody Does It

Written by Sally S. Simpson
Little has changed in the White-Collar/Corporate Crime arena since 1939 when Edwin H. Sutherland[1] called our attention to offending by persons who utilize their occupational positions and the opportunities therein to engage in illegal behavior [in spite of being “respectable and high status,”] as two recent editorials in the Washington Post[2] remind us. […]

The Yates Memorandum

Written by Gideon Mark
Perhaps the most trenchant critique of the federal government’s response to the Great Recession of 2007-09 was that the Department of Justice pursued enforcement actions against financial institutions but failed to prosecute any senior officers employed by those organizations.  The DOJ secured only one conviction of an individual […]

The Financial Choice Act of 2017

Written by Gideon Mark
On June 8, 2017 the U.S. House of Representatives passed on a virtually party-line vote the Financial Choice Act of 2017 (FCA), which is designed to repeal and rollback many of the most important reforms adopted by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010.  Dodd-Frank was enacted […]

Saving Government Pensions with Better Legal Standards

Written by Leigh Anenson
Millions of government employees are counting on the funds from their government pension plans to get them through their retirement years. But a potential economic crisis looms.  Many state and local pension systems teeter on the brink of financial disaster. What is more […]

Controversial use of administrative proceedings

In October 2016, C-BERC’s Associate Director Gideon Mark, associate professor of logistics, business and public policy at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, published an article entitled “SEC and CFTC Administrative Proceedings.”  The article appears in Volume 19 of the University of Pennsylvania’s Journal of Constitutional Law and can be found […]

Skip to toolbar