Webex-seminar: Moral Nudges, The Banker’s Oath, And Financial Advice

Financial misbehavior is widespread and costly. The Dutch government legally requires every employee in the financial sector to take a Hippocratic oath, the so-called “banker’s oath”. We investigate whether moral nudges that directly and indirectly remind financial advisers of their oath affect their service. In a large-scale audit study, professional auditors visited Dutch financial advisers and confronted them with a conflict of interest. Without intervention nearly half of the advice is more in the bank’s than in the customer’s interest. When auditors apply a moral nudge, referring to the banker’s oath, advisers are less likely to prioritize bank’s interests. Simply referring to customer interests (without mentioning the oath) does not produce comparable effects. In additional prediction tasks, we elicited beliefs about the audit study from a sample of Dutch customers and from Dutch regulators. The regulators expect much stronger treatment effects of the oath than observed in the field.