Turkey has considerably improved its terms of access to the global capital market. Progress in macroeconomic fundamentals has enhanced credibility and reduced risk premia and capital costs. This has had broad effects on capital supply conditions in the entire economy. Real interest rates have...

We investigate whether the spread of corporate debt contacts can be explained by their ultimate recovery rates. Using the actual realized recovery rates of defaulted debt instruments issued in the US from 1962 to 2007, we find that recovery rate is reflected in the spread at issuance, and that...

Two very large companies, Moody's and Standard & Poor's, dominate the credit-rating industry. These two companies own around 80 per cent of the market. No other significant major competitors exist, though there are companies that rate local securities in places like China and India. In India,...

Using the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 as a natural experiment, we document a non-monotonic relation between board independence and credit ratings. Ratings are upgraded with an exogenous increase of board independence only when independence is low, which is consistent with the costs as well as...

This study examines corporate transparency in the US market for a sample of 319 S&P 500 firms. We examine whether a number of disparate measures of corporate transparency used by other researchers are distinct, cohere as measures of a single factor of corporate transparency, or capture multiple...

We examine the association between real earnings management and the cost of new bond issues of U.S. corporations. We consider three types of real earnings management: sales manipulation, overproduction, and the abnormal reduction of discretionary expenditures. We find that overproduction impairs...

Consistent with existing evidence based on US firms, we show that good governance is associated with higher credit ratings. The most significant variables are institutional ownership and disclosure quality. This finding suggests that active monitoring (by large shareholders) and lower...

This paper presents a new approach to develop the probability of default for private firms. This work provides a global perspective regarding the credit risk prediction, starting from the work of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, with a deep study of the more predictive variables for...

For a continuous-time Markov process, commonly, only discrete-time observations are available. We analyze multiple observations of a homogeneous Markov jump process with an absorbing state. We establish consistency of the maximum likelihood estimator, as the number of Markov processes increases....