A recent study has found that a high incidence of sexual harassment at a company in a given year is likely to predict decidedly weak stock performance for that company in the following year, reported CFO.com.

The study, presented last week at the American Accounting Association, looked at reviews posted on employment-related websites Glassdoor and Indeed, including in their sample any company with at least 200 reviews. The researchers then assigned annual rankings based on the percentage of reviews that specifically complained about sexual harassment; the majority of firms had zero complaints, but in others, they made up as much as 8.3 percent of all reviews.

The firms in the top 2 percent of harassment incidence, as measured by sexual harassment complaints, saw their share prices dip the following year by about 20 percent below what would be expected from standard asset-pricing models and overall market conditions. The researchers noted that the amount of shareholder value lost was far higher than the $300,000 cap on sexual harassment settlements.

The researchers did not believe this to be a sign that investors punish companies with persistent sexual harassment problems. Rather, firms with a high incidence of sexual harassment complaints are more likely to be firms that investors punish for other reasons: The sexual harassment complaints are likely to reflect operational shortcomings generally at these companies.