The seeds for the 2007-09 financial collapse were sewn over many years and nurtured by ill-advised governmental housing policy, the presence of pervasive fraud both large and small and the widespread failure of personal integrity. A chronology of bad choices made by individuals and the...

Companies that are going to thrive must have a soul. Those that are only concerned with “maximizing shareholder wealth” or “maximizing profit” will find themselves going the way Enron went. CEOs will have to lead the revolution and should be the ones exhorting executives to make...

This paper demonstrates that much can be learned about ethical academic leadership from the great teachers living in ancient times, especially Confucius and Hillel. Those who desire to follow in their footsteps should be humble, gentle, extremely patient with people, and love humanity. They...

Purpose This research aims to study budgetary slack from a behavioural perspective, especially examining the effect of gender and code of ethics on budgetary slack ethical judgment. Design/methodology/approach This study adopts the experimental method of 2 × 3 between-subjects mixed factorial...

The authors posit that one should not take a binary approach to business ethics because there are gradations. They propose that firms may be classified according to the following metric: Level I: The Totally Unethical Organization; Level II: The Legalistic Unethical Organization; Level III: The...

This article presents a new method of teaching ethics in economics based on recent developments in game theory. Economics traditionally divides normative questions from positive questions, and relies only on the Pareto principle to distinguish good actions and policies from bad ones in answering...

A transcription of a 2019 conversation with Duke historian E. Roy Weintraub on his intellectual development over the 1980s from mathematician to economist to historian. The conversation also explored Weintraub's early and continuing attempts to forge new ways to study the history of contemporary...

First part: Finance is built on a three-dimension risk: risk is measured, assessed, aggregated. If the economics of the crisis encourage reform and relaunch, it is also the sign of a crisis of economics. Two lessons can be drawn: avoid absurd risk -a fourth and often forgotten dimension of risk-...

Following a stream of experimental results (e.g. Marwell and Ames 1981, Carter and Irons 1991, Frank et al. 1993, Yezer et al. 1996, Selten and Ockenfelds 1998, Frank and Schulze 2000, Frey and Meier 2002, Rubinstein 2006), it has become common to believe that economists are more selfish than...

These brief, casual remarks were delivered at an event to discuss Russell Roberts’s book How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life. I provide nine quotations from Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, each quotation stating a source of vice, disorder, and corruption in human life. Smith...