Sean Wang is Assistant Professor of Accounting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This post is based on an article by Professor Wang, Mark Lang, Professor of Accounting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Chad Ham and Nicholas Seybert, both of the Department of Accounting & Information Assurance at the University of Maryland.
In Kurt Eichenwald’s Conspiracy of Fools, the author details the collapse of the Enron empire and places the majority of the blame on their CFO, Andrew Fastow. Fastow is credited with being responsible for engineering the special purpose entities, which hid the majority of Enron’s debt from their balance sheets. The excess leverage created risks that were opaque to Enron’s shareholders, and were largely responsible for Enron’s bankruptcy. Eichenwald’s interviews with Fastow’s colleagues portrayed him as a narcissist who would do anything for his own self-interest at the expense of the welfare of those around him.
In our paper, CFO Narcissism and Financial Reporting Quality, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we examine whether CFO narcissism can impact financial reporting outcomes. We focus on CFOs because of their primary role in financial reporting decisions. We conjecture that the traits of narcissism, which include exploitativeness, the domination of group decisions, a sense of self-entitlement, inflated self-perceptions, and a constant need for recognition, will result in narcissistic CFOs being more willing to exploit power and information asymmetry to engage in misreporting.