Improving corporate ethics, governance, and financial risk regulation through objective, empirical research and analysis.
RAND research on corporate ethics and governance aims to improve public understanding of corporate ethics, law, and governance. Our work also addresses related problems in public policy and risk management, particularly concerning the relationship between regulators and the private sector. Research projects have been supported by government, foundation, and private-sector sponsors.
RAND's work in this area began in the wake of the Enron and Worldcom scandals, and the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002. Those historical events, together with the 2008 financial crisis, illustrate a complex public policy nexus that touches on many different issues: corporate ethics and senior management misconduct; organizational governance and risk management; systemic risk and financial regulation; and ultimately, the role of government in regulating the business behavior of large organizations. We strive to conduct work in all of these areas.
Over the past decade, some of our major research efforts have included empirical studies on board governance and the impact of Sarbanes-Oxley; on the landscape of investment-advisers and broker-dealers and the impact of federal regulation upon them; and on the relationship between fair value accounting and systemic risk in the lead-up to the 2008 crisis. To all of this work, we bring RAND's full set of research capabilities, including a world class, multi-disciplinary staff; scientific rigor and objectivity in approach; and a commitment to advancing the public good through our work.
In this first-ever regional assessment of firm-level governance networks in East and Southeast Asia, the author describes the structure of these interfirm networks and documents their dramatic growth and integration between 2006 and 2020. In addition to offering a descriptive account of the structure of these networks, the analysis describes suggestive structural factors that offer insight into the future of regional integration.
The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) has provided funds to small businesses to ease the economic effects of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. However, the PPP did not initially disburse funds to companies owned by individuals with felony backgrounds. In this report, researchers estimate how many small businesses have owners with criminal history records and how many businesses were potentially affected by PPP restrictions.
Businesses operating overseas have inadequate tools for assessing business bribery risk and their potential risk of violating various anti-corruption laws. This report introduces a new index, the TRACE Matrix, for business bribery risk assessment. The index provides a quick and useful guide for businesses operating overseas based on a conceptual model of bribery risk and supported by data specific to firms.
This Perspective — part of a series examining critical security challenges in 2040 — reviews the concept of speed and offers key points for policymakers and the public to consider in preparing for the possibilities and implications of a faster future. The authors hypothesize that this iteration of acceleration could be more intense and introduce new security threats, and that its scale and scope could vary across cultural and geographic categories.
The Department of State has developed several organizational elements and cultural attributes relevant for a lessons-learned program, and these provide a starting point from which the department can mature its enterprisewide capabilities. To that end, this report explores best practices across fields of organizational theory and within both public and private organizations.
A summary of a symposium at which directors, executives, compliance officers, and other stakeholders discussed mechanisms and programs in support of corporate political spending (CPS) disclosure and accountability policies. Topics included creating and enforcing effective CPS programs, obstacles to creating such programs, and management and board roles in ensuring CPS accountability.
This report addresses the use of criminal sanctions to control corporate behavior — prosecutions both of corporations and of employees for actions taken on corporations' behalf. The authors describe the current state of the use of criminal sanctions in controlling corporate behavior, describe how the current regime developed, and offer suggestions about how the use of criminal sanctions to control corporate behavior might be improved.
RAND convened the symposium "Transforming Compliance: Emerging Paradigms for Boards, Management, Compliance Officers, and Government" in May 2014 in order to stimulate a forward-looking conversation about compliance as a field, factors that are likely to contribute to its transformational change, and practical implications for key stakeholder groups. These proceedings summarize the discussions and include the white papers.
