The idea that companies might want to avoid hiring chief executives with a history of felony drug charges is hardly a surprising one. But it is not as obvious that even simple traffic tickets seem to correlate with fraud.

Of the 109 chief executives from nonfraudulent companies, just five had traffic tickets. Sixteen of the fraud company chief executives had such tickets. Some of them also had more serious violations. Altogether, 22 of the 109 had some previous violation.

“We still have pretty strong results if we use only speeding tickets,” Mr. Davidson said. “The implication is you would at least want to consider the things that are often considered relatively minor.”

The statistics are far from conclusive — 109 is not a large number — but they may take on a little more weight from the decision of the researchers to investigate an additional 164 chief executives. They came from 94 companies that were forced to restate their financial statements but were not accused of fraud by the S.E.C., and from 70 others chosen at random from the universe of companies that did not have fraud or accounting errors. None of the 164 had serious offenses, and the proportion with minor traffic violations was much lower than it was among the fraudulent companies.

What this could indicate is that people who are willing to violate one set of social norms are more likely to be willing to violate far more serious ones.

The identities of the chief executives with records were not disclosed by the researchers, so we do not know which executive was charged with each crime, or if he or she was convicted. Given the absolute power some chief executives have within their companies, it might be interesting to look at how bosses previously accused of domestic violence treated their subordinates in the office. The researchers also set out to see if what they call unfrugal chief executives run companies that are fundamentally different from those run by bosses who spend less on themselves.

To determine that required decisions on just what constituted unfrugal behavior. They settled on a definition involving ownership of homes, boats and cars, which is available from public records. Chief executives were deemed to be unfrugal if they owned a car that listed for more than $75,000, a boat that was more than 25 feet long or a house worth more than twice the average cost of a home near the company’s headquarters.