This paper examines the role of credit rating agencies in the subprime crisis that triggered the 2007-08 financial turmoil. The focus of the paper is on two aspects of ratings that contributed to the boom and bust of the market for asset-backed securities: rating inflation and coarse information...

We present a model in which issuers of asset backed securities choose to release coarse information to enhance the liquidity of their primary market, at the cost of reducing secondary market liquidity or even causing it to freeze. The degree of transparency is inefficiently low if the social...