Previous studies show that the unsolicited ratings of S&P and Fitch are lower than the solicited ratings assigned by these two agencies. The unsolicited ratings of S&P and Fitch are based on publicly available information for a firm. However, no previous study has examined the unsolicited...

We analyse sovereign watch and outlook signals from Moody's, S&P and Fitch. Prior literature shows strong market reactions to these signals, which arguably contain more new information than rating changes. We show that the agencies' actions imply different policies: S&P has more emphasis on...

Credit rating agencies occupies a major role in the global economy in the last two décades. Its appearence was mainly to help investors in the Financial markets to take rational investment decisions by providing a rating that reflects The creditworthiness of the debtor and hence reduce the...

In Elamin (2013), the credit rating agency (CRA) cannot credibly fully reveal its information about the quality of a rated structured finance project, when ratings are unverifiable. Can the fear of losing its reputation discipline the CRA? In this paper, there is incomplete information about the...

The rents agents can extract from principals increase with the magnitude of incentive problems, which the literature usually takes as given. We endogenize it, by allowing agents to choose technologies that are more or less opaque and correspondingly prone to agency problems. In our overlapping...

Estimating the effect of Federal Reserve's announcements of Large-Scale Asset Purchase (LSAP) programs on corporate credit risk is complicated by the simultaneity of policy decisions and movements in prices of risky financial assets, as well as by the fact that both interest rates of assets...

There is a demand for safe assets, either government bonds or private substitutes, for use as collateral. Government bonds are safe assets, given the government's power to tax, but their supply is driven by fiscal considerations, and does not necessarily meet the private demand for safe assets....

Heightened counterparty risk during the recent financial crisis has raised questions about the role clearinghouses play in global financial stability. Empirical identification of the effect of centralized clearing on counterparty risk is challenging because of the co-incidence of macro-economic...

In der wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Literatur wird das ökonomische Potenzial von Immobilienverzehrprodukten vielseitig diskutiert. Obwohl diesen Produkten aus wohlfahrts-theoretischen Gesichtspunkten eine hohe Bedeutung beigemessen wird, zeigt die empirische Evidenz, dass die Nachfrage weit...

Why do large European banks lobby for monetary union? We show in a game-theoretic model that monetary union can trigger a change in the structure of the market for international banking transactions with asymmetric effects on profits: large banks are induced to cooperate internationally and gain...