Trusting financial advisors is key to the best outcomes, but what determines the most trustworthy financial advisors?

Jesse Ellis, Alan T. Dickson distinguished professor of finance at North Carolina State University, looks at their beginnings.

Jesse Ellis is the Alan T. Dickson Distinguished Professor of Finance at North Carolina State University’s Poole College of Management. His research explores financial advisor behavior, institutional investing, and the cultural and psychological foundations of financial decision-making. His work has been published in leading academic journals, including The Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial Economics, and Management Science.

Financial advisors manage trillions of dollars and help families make their biggest financial decisions. But here’s the catch: financial products are complex, and most people lack the expertise to know whether they’re getting good advice. Economists call this a credence good: clients have to trust the expert because they can’t easily evaluate the service.

So what keeps advisors from exploiting that trust? Regulation and market incentives help, but they’re not enough: about one in thirteen financial advisors has a record of misconduct. When monitoring is hard, personal ethics do a lot of the heavy lifting.

Where do those ethics come from? People form core moral beliefs during adolescence, absorbing norms from the culture around them. We asked whether advisors’ professional conduct is shaped by the ethical climate of their childhood hometowns.

We tracked more than 86,000 financial advisors from their childhood addresses into their adult careers. Using regional data on political corruption, corporate fraud, and other ethical violations, we built a misbehavior index capturing each area’s ethical climate. Does growing up in a place with higher tolerance for rule-breaking predict misconduct decades later?

Yes—by a lot. Advisors raised in Staten Island show misconduct rates around 16 percent; those from Omaha just over 2 percent. Even after advisors move across the country, childhood hometown culture predicts misconduct more strongly than their current location’s culture. The pattern appears even within the same branch office—comparing advisors working at the same firm in the same location, those raised in higher-misbehavior areas are more likely to misbehave than their coworkers.

The takeaway: monitoring and reputation help, but ethical behavior in finance also reflects the moral standards we internalize growing up—what Adam Smith called the impartial spectator that guides us when no one is watching.

Read More:

[Oxford Academic] - Childhood Exposure to Misbehavior and the Culture of Financial Misconduct

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Jesse Ellis, North Carolina State University - The Moral Roots of Financial Misconduct

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Jesse Ellis, North Carolina State University - The Moral Roots of Financial Misconduct