CEO Scandals Dog Company Reputations Years After They're Fired

  • Stanford study finds news coverage of scandals lasts 4.9 years
  • Share prices declined an average of 3.1% after an incident

Renaud Laplanche.

Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
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Damage from media coverage of LendingClub Corp.’s ouster of its chief executive officer after an internal review found abuses tied to the sale of a loan may take years to fade.

The fallout from a lying, cheating, embezzling or offensive CEO can linger to soil the reputation of a company by an average of five years after an incident has passed, according to a Stanford University analysis, being released this week, that studied 38 examples of bosses behaving badly from 2000 to 2015.