This article demonstrates that a fiscal expansion can induce both a short- and long-run depreciation of a currency and, by parallel arguments, fiscal contraction can induce short- and long-run appreciation. This possibility hinges on a country being a debtor with at least some of its debt...

This paper tests whether the tendency of third rating agencies to assign higher ratings than Moody's and Standard & Poor's results from more lenient standards or sample selection bias. More lenient standards might result from incentives to satisfy issuers who are, in fact, the purchasers of the...

In this article, we present the first systematic analysis of the sovereign credit ratings of the two leading agencies, Moody's and Standard & Poor's (S&P). We find that the ordering of risks they imply is broadly consistent with macroeconomic fundamentals. While the agencies cite a large number...

Despite the fact that over 50 percent of all corporate bonds have different ratings from Moody's and Standard and Poor's at issuance, most bond pricing models ignore these differences of opinion. Our work compares a number of different methods of accounting for split ratings in estimating bond...

Rating-dependent financial regulators assume that the same letter ratings from different agencies imply the same levels of default risk. Most "third" agencies, however, assign significantly higher ratings on average than Moody's and Standard & Poor's. We show that, contrary to the claims of some...