The Effectiveness of SEC Enforcement in Deterring Financial Misconduct

This paper examines how the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) enforcement actions and whom they target deter future financial misconduct. An enforcement action reduces the incidence of misconduct in other firms in the same industry and metropolitan statistical area (MSA) in the future. Furthermore, an enforcement that punishes a guilty company has a larger deterrence effect on future misconduct than punishing an officer, auditor, attorney, or other entity. In addition, the results are robust to using alternative measures of financial misconduct such as restatements and Fscore. These results have several policy implications on how regulatory agencies can maximize the value of their enforcements.