We study competition between an incumbent Credit Rating Agency (CRA) and a sequence of entrant CRAs that are potentially more e¤ective but whose ability in appraising default risk is unproven when they enter the market. We show that free entry competition fails to select the most competent CRA...

The recent subprime crisis and the ongoing Euro zone crisis have generated an enormous interest in the credit rating industry not only among economists but also among average citizens. As a consequence, we have seen an explosion of the economic literature on the industry. The objective of this...

We conduct a series of experiments that simulate trading in financial markets and which allows us to identify the different effects that subjects’ risk attitudes and belief updating rules have on the information content of the order flow. We find that there are very few risk-neutral subjects...