We analyze the impact of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank) on corporate bond ratings issued by credit rating agencies (CRAs). We find no evidence that Dodd-Frank disciplines CRAs to provide more accurate and informative credit ratings. Instead, following...

Capital flight associated with the onset of a financial crisis in a country is often accompanied by an inflow of capital associated with foreign direct investment (FDI). Our paper provides a theoretical framework for this puzzle, and draws wider conclusions on the welfare effects of foreign...

We consider a moral hazard setup wherein leveraged firms have incentives to take on excessive risks and are thus rationed when they attempt to borrow in order to meet liquidity shocks. The rationed firms can optimally pledge cash as collateral to borrow more, but in the process must liquidate...

Ratings issued by credit rating agencies (CRAs) play an important role in the global financial environment. Among other issues, past studies have explored the potential for predicting these ratings using a variety of explanatory factors and modeling approaches. This paper describes a...

We test if issuers of asset- and mortgage-backed securities receive rating favors from agencies with which they maintain strong business relationships. Controlling for issuer fixed effects and a large set of credit risk determinants, we show that agencies publish better ratings for those issuers...

We study risk and return characteristics of CDOs using the market standard models. We find that fair spreads on CDO tranches are much higher than fair spreads on similarly-rated corporate bonds. Our results imply that credit ratings are not sufficient for pricing, which is surprising given their...

We provide evidence that lenders differ in their ex post incentives to internalize price-default externalities associated with the liquidation of collateralized debt. Using the mortgage market as a laboratory, we conjecture that lenders with a large share of outstanding mortgages on their...

One of the several regulatory failures behind the global financial crisis that started in 2007 has been the regulatory focus on individual, rather than systemic, risk of financial institutions. Focusing on systemically important assets and liabilities (SIALs) rather than individual financial...

A competitive stock market is embedded into a neoclassical growth economy to analyze the interplay between the acquisition of information about firms, its partial revelation through stock prices, capital allocation and income. The stock market allows investors to share their costly private...

We test the biasedness of unsolicited ratings relative to solicited ratings using the ex post firm performance measured by the long-run stock performance of firms following rating announcements and changes. We find that the announcements of new unsolicited ratings are followed by negative...