Major and Classification
Business Administration
Faculty Mentor
Mark Solliman, Ph.D.
Department
Marshall: Accounting
McNair Project
“The Effect of Narcissistic Tendencies in CEO on Accounting Fraud”
Project Abstract
CEO overconfidence is well studied in business and accounting liter- ature. However, only recently have researchers started to examine the influence of narcissism. This study investigates the association between CEO narcissism and accounting fraud in order to provide new informa- tion that may detect fraud earlier. The two measures of narcissism used are CEO photographs and personal pronoun usage percentage. This study examined a data set that consisted of 18 companies convicted of fraud from 1998-2002. These companies were then compared to 18 non-fraud companies from the same era. The study yielded some important insights; however due to the small sample size results at the present time are not statistically significant.