People have always joked that there is no such thing as bad publicity, but the saying may prove to be true for the banking industry.

Thomas Roulet of Cambridge University recently authored a report published in the journal “Human Relations” that found that when the media exposed greedy, aggressive or risky behavior among bankers, such behavior was not curbed.

In fact, it had the opposite effect: negative media coverage actually helped banks gain business in the lucrative field of managing initial public offerings.

“Although negative media coverage may turn general public opinion against big banks, the clients of investment banks leading IPOs are hardly members of the mass public,” Roulet said in an op-ed published in Barron’s. “Instead, the business executives who hire investment banks to lead IPOs as book runners usually share the professional values of the bankers criticized in negative press coverage.”

The study examined more than 3,500 IPOs between 2007 and 2011, analyzing press coverage of those banks in three top U.S. daily newspapers – The Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post – on 28 investment banks, which together represent nearly 90 percent of invitations to be book runners.

Roulet evaluated the negative perspective on typical practices of the industry based on 204 words grouped along four factors: greed, violence, opacity and risk-taking.

Newspaper descriptions like “shameless” and “excess” are part of the greed category, “fierce” and “frenzy” fit the idea of a violent battleground, “cryptic” and “hazy” are words depicting opacity and “gamble” and “casino” are associated with risk.

Roulet measured the degree of disapproval in the news articles based on the density of the keywords and how they were associated with the banks. He found that the banks identified in negative news articles were more likely to be picked as part of IPO syndicates in the following months, all other factors being equal.

The report found this to be perhaps most obvious following a fiercely critical 2009 report by Andrew Cuomo, then the New York attorney general – and now governor – about huge bank bonuses above $1 million, $2 million and $3 million at nine banks bailed out by the Troubled Asset Relief Program. In subsequent months, the banks named in the report enjoyed a rise in IPO invitations relative to banks not named.

“Average citizens may be outraged that investment bankers – encouraged by their IPO clients – get more business by acting in ways that most people find unacceptable,” Roulet said. “But my research suggests that this behavior is unlikely to disappear. In fact, to those in the industry, it serves as a powerful signal of shared values. They’re just not main street’s values.”