Unsolicited credit ratings are issued solely at the discretion of rating agencies based on public information. This paper analyzes firms' incentives to solicit credit ratings to signal their quality and rating agencies' incentives to issue unsolicited ratings. Conditions for two types of...

This paper provides evidence of ratings shopping in the corporate bond market. By estimating systematic differences in agencies' biases about any given firm's bonds, I show that new bonds are more likely to be rated by agencies that are positively biased towards the firm---a pattern that is...

We investigate whether the stock market impact of tone in Moody's rating reports depends on negative news. Reports convey negative news through negative rating actions (downgrades, reviews for downgrade or negative outlooks) or negative tone if there is no rating action. Using data from U.S....

I examine the effects of contemporaneous credit rating and watchlist announcements on the over-the-counter U.S. corporate bond market. I find significant negative daily abnormal returns (-2.91%) over a ten-day window associated with a downgrade announcement with negative watch. The effect is...

The credit rating agencies in the sphere of international finance and the global economy in general perform an important information function. Nevertheless, their activity has been largely discredited recently due to the big number of internal and external factors. Without claiming to solve all...

This paper investigates the reaction of credit default swaps spreads to changes in rating class, outlook, and watchlist entries for sovereigns. We find a stronger response to negative outlook and watchlist changes than for actual rating class downgrades, which shows that negative outlook and...

The credit rating agencies in the sphere of international finance and the global economy in general perform an important information function. Nevertheless, their activity has been largely discredited recently due to the big number of internal and external factors. Without claiming to solve all...

In this financial engineering research, we study the behaviour of an option premium of a call/put option which is embedded in a typical fixed coupon bond with finite maturity. The contribution of the research is the conclusion about the dynamics of premium changes; represented by direction and...

This article describes and models the ratings announced by rating agencies to Brazilian ABS (FIDC) and address the important issue of agencies incentives to mismanage the rating they provide. We show that the debt provisions and the total assets of the FIDC are the main variables that explain...