Cheating on your spouse goes hand in hand with cheating in theworkplace.

That’s the conclusion of a provocative new academic study thatfound a strong correlation between adultery and workplacemisconduct by corporate executives and financial advisers.

The study came about in an unlikely way. Finance professors atthe University of Texas at Austin and Emory University were able toexamine customers of Ashley Madison, a dating site for marriedpeople looking to have affairs, or “discreet encounters” as thesite puts it. That’s because a computer hack in 2015 exposed thenames and personal data of more than 30 million users.

Researchers examined four groups of users specifically—a totalof 11,000 brokers, corporate executives, white-collar criminals,and police officers. Cross-checking against public records, theyfound that those Ashley Madison customers were more than twice aslikely to have violated professional codes of conduct compared witha control group, according to authors John Griffin, Samuel Kruger,and Gonzalo Maturana.

“Our study indicates cheating in one context carries over tocheating in others,” said Griffin, who has a specialtyinvestigating Wall Street misconduct. “We’re not trying to debateethics or lecture people. All we’re doing is examining the data,and the data is fairly strong.”

The findings add to the conversation that was long consideredoff-limits in corporate board rooms: the personal lives ofexecutives. That was until the MeToo era, a movement against sexualharassment that has led to exits of CEOs including Les Moonves ofCBS and Steve Wynn of Wynn Resorts.

The results were fairly consistent across the four occupations.For example, the study found that 4.1 percent of individualsaccused of violating securities laws by the U.S. Securities andExchange Commission (SEC) between 2010 and 2015 had paid accountsat Ashley Madison. That compared with 1 percent of the controlpopulation, which consisted of people with similar work historiesbut no misconduct charges.

CEOs and CFOs who had accounts were twice as likely to haveengaged in a financial misstatement or be the focus of aclass-action securities lawsuit between 2008 and 2014. Cheatingbrokers were more likely than the control group to have black markson their records maintained by the Financial Industry RegulatoryAuthority (FINRA).

The professors encountered a few research hurdles, includingethical questions about using Ashley Madison data in the firstplace. They concluded it was in the public domain. Also, the site,whose slogan is “Life is Short. Have an Affair,” had some fakeusers. So Griffin and his co-authors narrowed their study tocustomers who had matching addresses from credit card numbers.There’s also the unknown of whether members of the control groupengaged in marital infidelity outside of Ashley Madison.

But Griffin is confident in the findings, to be published thisweek in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy ofSciences.

“If you’re foolish [enough] to put your name into such a site,you’re foolish enough to make other mistakes,” said Davia Temin,founder of crisis consultancy Temin & Co. in New York.

Copyright 2019 Bloomberg. All rightsreserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten,or redistributed.