"Credit reporting is a critical part of the financial system in most developed economies but is often weak or absent in developing countries. It addresses a fundamental problem of credit markets: asymmetric information between borrowers and lenders that can lead to adverse selection and moral...

Rating agencies report ordinal ratings in discrete classes . We question the market's implicit assumption that agencies define their classe s on identical scales, e.g., that AAA by Standard & Poor's is equivalent to Aaa by Moody's. To this end, we develop a non-parametric method to estimate the...