The badness you do is not only bad in itself, it has offspring. This paper is interesting in providing some empirical evidence that being bad encourages others around you to be bad as well. Here is the abstract:

We find that a firm’s tendency to engage in financial misconduct increases with the misconduct rates of neighboring firms. This appears to be caused by peer effects, rather than exogenous shocks like regional variation in enforcement. Effects are stronger among firms of comparable size, and among CEOs of similar age. Moreover, local waves of financial misconduct correspond with local waves of non-financial corruption, such as political fraud.