If rating agencies add no new information to markets, their actions are not a public policy concern. But as rating changes may be anticipated, testing whether ratings add value is not straightforward. This paper argues that ratings and spreads are both noisy signals of fundamentals and suggest...

The information that ESG raters produce is valuable. Assessing ESG performance is conceptually challenging because we need to measure contextuality, additionality, and preferences. ESG raters, specialized ESG data providers, and aggregators can harness economies of scale. Regulators should...

We apply a new estimator to the measurement of the economic returns to education. We control for endogenous education, unobserved ability and measurement error using only the natural heteroscedasticty of wages and education attainment. Our prefered estimate, 6.07%, is closer to the OLS estimate...

The paper presents a framework for analyzing the degree of financial transmission between money, bond and equity markets and exchange rates within and between the United States and the euro area. We find that asset prices react strongest to other domestic asset price shocks, and that there are...

This paper reviews the empirical literature on international spillovers and contagion. Theoretical models of spillover and contagion imply that the reduced form observable variables suffer from two possible sources of bias: endogeneity and omitted variables. These econometric problems in...

This paper investigates the relationship between hard currency and financial development. It creates four different series of hard currency based on different sets of data. The results of the paper suggest that indeed financial development and the hardness of currencies are highly correlated....

This paper analyzes sovereign risk shift-contagion, i.e. positive and significant changes in the propagation mechanisms, using bond yield spreads for the major eurozone countries. By emphasizing the use of two econometric approaches based on quantile regressions (standard quantile regression and...

In this paper we study the question of debt sustainability from a risk management perspective. The debt accumulation equation for any country involves variables that are stochastic and closely intertwined. When these aspects are taken into consideration the notion of debt sustainability is...

We give semiparametric identification and estimation results for econometric models with a regressor that is endogenous, bound censored and selected, called a Tobin regressor. First, we show that true parameter value is set identified and characterize the identification sets. Second, we propose...