SIBS Research Community Seminar – Professor Jordan Siegel
Title: High-Profile Enforcement Efficiently Deters White-Collar Crime: Paul Manafort’s Prosecution Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (with Jin Hyung Kim and Reuben Hurst)
Date: 8 May 2024
Time: 14:15- 15:45
Online: https://newcastleuniversity.zoom.us/j/86061878793
If you would like to attend, please register using the following link:
Speaker: Professor Jordan Siegel – U Michigan (8 May 2024)
https://michiganross.umich.edu/faculty-research/faculty/jordan-siegel
Jordan Siegel is a Professor of Strategy at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. Professor Siegel is also a Research Fellow at the William Davidson Institute and an Associate-in-Research at the Harvard Korea Institute of the Harvard Asia Center. Professor Siegel specializes in the study of how companies gain competitive advantage through their global strategy. He finds that there are numerous opportunities for companies to attain superior sustainable corporate performance through creative strategies for corporate governance and human resource management.
A set of studies written by Professor Siegel explores how companies borrow, leverage, and arbitrage institutions across borders as a means of attaining long-term competitive advantage. By institutions Professor Siegel refers to the formal and informal rules of the game that affect companies’ competitive behaviour and resource access. Formal institutions include corporate, securities, and bankruptcy law; informal institutions include a society’s cultural stance toward meritocracy and egalitarianism. (While a thorough list of rules of the game might be near-infinite, Professor Siegel concentrates on those that directly affect governance of companies.) The main idea is that companies—even single-country-focused companies—exhibit a surprising ability to attain competitive advantage via their choices of other countries’ institutions.
Professor Siegel’s work has been published in Management Science, Administrative Science Quarterly, the Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Comparative Economics, and the Journal of Economic Literature.
Abstract:
We present enforcement against high-profile white-collar criminals as an understudied, resource-efficient strategy for enhancing white-collar rule of law. In so doing, we apply insights from the management and sociology literatures about status spillovers. These enforcement actions demonstrate law enforcement agencies’ willingness to pursue criminals with even the most resources to evade punishment, which generates widespread fear of prosecution among the broader population of potential white-collar criminals and a consequent far-reaching increase in rule of law. We examine this “Big Fish” hypothesis in the context of high-profile enforcement against Paul Manafort in 2017 for violating the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Comparing compliance under FARA to compliance under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, we demonstrate that enforcement against Manafort caused a widespread, sustained, and economically significant increase in FARA compliance. We present evidence that this effect was driven by a Beckerian cost-benefit mechanism wherein lobbying entities came to disclose reputationally hazardous relationships they would have otherwise kept concealed.