Does Financial Academic Research Care About 'Ethics'?

The 2008 financial crisis has highlighted a series of inefficiencies in the financial system and raised the issue of the ethics of finance actors. Ethics has become a major issue for regulators and practitioners alike. This article investigates whether the academic community in finance has shown a corresponding increase in interest for ethics over the last years or not, and especially after the financial crisis. To know how much finance research care about ethics, we start from the production of academic researchers and study peer-review articles published in flagship journals. We systematically screen them, their title, keywords, and full text to find out more about the academic interest for ethic-related subjects, and its development over time. We identify 122 articles through this process, in which the word “ethic” is quoted and keep only 54 articles for which ethics is a central issue. Our approach allows us to conclude in favor of a significant strengthening of the interest of finance researchers for ethics. However, as long as finance will rest on its neo-classical foundations, ethics will remain an issue difficult to treat