We study whether the effectiveness of corporate governance mechanisms varies depending on the characteristics of the executives subject to these mechanisms, namely their “psychological type,” as proxied by their history of legal infractions. In particular, we examine insider trading, where we can compare the trading behavior of different types of executives in the same firm. We find that “recordholder” executives, that is, those with prior legal infractions, earn significantly higher profits from purchases and sales than nonrecordholder executives. Furthermore, the profitability of both purchases and sales is significantly increasing in the severity of the infraction. Governance mechanisms, such as blackout policies, lower profits of executives with only traffic infractions; however, profits for executives with serious infractions appear insensitive to blackout policies. Insiders with serious infractions are also more likely to trade during blackout periods and before large information events and are more likely to report their trades to the SEC after the filing deadline. Collectively, our evidence suggests that while governance mechanisms can discipline executives with minor offenses, they appear largely ineffective for those with more serious infractions.

We examine how shareholders' trust in managers is affected by (i) the outcome of earnings management (inconsistent vs. consistent with shareholders' interests) and (ii) the method of earnings management (accruals vs. real methods). Using a controlled experiment, we predict and find that trust is impaired when the outcome of earnings management suggests that managers have put their interests above shareholders' interests and/or when the method of earnings management suggests that managers misreported the firm's economic performance. We argue that shareholders assess managers putting their interests above shareholders' interests as a signal of untrustworthiness because it involves a transfer of the firm's resources away from shareholders to managers. We argue that shareholders also assess managers' use of accruals to manage earnings as a signal of untrustworthiness because, in this instance, managers misreport the firm's economic performance. Finally, we show that trust mediates the combined effects of the outcome of earnings management and the method of earnings management on investment decisions. Our study incrementally contributes to the literature by highlighting the adverse implications of managers' use of accruals to manage earnings even when its outcome serves shareholders' interests.

Employer‐sponsored opportunities for altruism outside the workplace can improve employee engagement and passion within the firm, enhance the firm's corporate visibility, and improve its recruitment. There is limited understanding of whether and how a firm's management control system on employees' daily tasks can influence employee willingness to engage in altruism outside the workplace. In this study, we investigate via an experiment how the incentive scheme (tournament vs. piece rate) on employees' daily tasks interacts with the difficulty level of these tasks (low vs. high) to affect employees' altruistic behavior outside the firm. Our results indicate that, compared to a piece‐rate scheme, a tournament scheme leads to a greater decrease in non‐winning participants' altruistic behavior outside the firm when the original, incentivized task is more difficult compared to when it is less difficult. Consistent with our theory, participants' feelings of excessive entitlement partially mediate the interaction effect of incentive scheme and task difficulty on participants' altruistic behavior outside the firm. This study informs firms about how the design of its incentive scheme on employees' daily task inside the firm and the nature of that task can influence employee willingness to act altruistically outside the firm.