Why was risk management not effective in preventing financial institutions from bubbles in the past? 1. Because the emerge of the bubbles were not recognized at all. 2. Because risk managers did not have sufficient authority to stop the nonsense....

We use a unique dataset of bond downgrades from a niche rating company that has been found to be reacting faster to publicly available information than its competitors. Using regime-switching models we propose risk measures to quantify stock return disturbances (distress costs) associated with...