Substance Abuse and Workplace Fraud: Evidence from Physicians

We examine the relation between worker substance abuse and workplace fraud in a sample of medical doctors. Relative to their peers, we observe that doctors engaging in substance abuse are between 50 and 100 times more likely to commit fraud in a given year. This result is consistent with research su...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of business ethics Vol. 183; no. 2; pp. 585 - 602
Main Authors Millar, Melanie, White, Roger M., Zheng, Xin
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.03.2023
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Accounting
Addictive behaviors
Alcohol
Behavior
Business and Management
Business Ethics
Drug abuse
Education
Employees
Ethics
Fraud
Management
Medical malpractice
Neurosciences
Opioids
Original Paper
Payoffs
Peers
Philosophy
Physicians
Quality of Life Research
Sanctions
Self regulation
Settlements & damages
Substance abuse
Tests
Violations
Workplaces
Impulsivity
G40
K42
M51
Substance abuse
Fraud
Delay discounting
M41
M12
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Summary:We examine the relation between worker substance abuse and workplace fraud in a sample of medical doctors. Relative to their peers, we observe that doctors engaging in substance abuse are between 50 and 100 times more likely to commit fraud in a given year. This result is consistent with research suggesting that substance abuse both creates financial pressures and impairs the functioning of cognitive self-regulatory mechanisms. Our results are robust in within-subject tests and between-subject tests, as well as in tests using instrumental variables that exploit exogenous variation in the state-level availability of opioids, a commonly abused substance.
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ISSN:0167-4544
1573-0697
DOI:10.1007/s10551-022-05065-6