This study aims to understand how public values shape corporate and public governance and, in turn, influence financial crimes, with the goal of aligning governance mechanisms with societal values to reduce financial misconduct. The data was gathered from seven credible databases, spanning 54 countries from the year 2012 to 2022. Financial crimes were operationalised using three sources: the Basel AML Index (money laundering), the Corruption Perceptions Index (corruption), and the World Enterprise Survey (tax evasion). The public values (religious values, ethical values, post-materialistic index) data set was taken from the World Values Survey. The World Governance Indicators were used for public governance, whereas country-level corporate governance was operationalised using IMF prescribed technique. For data analysis, fixed effects, random effects, and generalised method of moments were used, as per the underlying data structure. For mediation Hayes’s PROCESS Macro was used. Mediation analysis shows that public governance is the primary pathway through which societal values influence the incidence of financial crimes. Corporate governance serves as a secondary channel and exhibits only limited partial mediation. Since public governance fully mediates the effect of public values, reforms should prioritise political stability, regulatory quality, and control of corruption mechanism over corporate-level interventions. Prior work often models culture; because values sit at the core of culture, this study directly operationalises public values. It also analyses three types of financial crime drawn from three independent sources and finds convergent results, indicating robustness. It empirically demonstrate how moral orientations embedded in public values translate into institutional integrity through governance mechanisms.
ALI et al. (2026) studied this question.