We dissect the information content of sovereign credit rating reports issued by Moody's in 62 countries for the period 2003–2013. Using the Naïve Bayesian machine learning algorithm, we classify all sentences in each report into positive and negative tone, as well as six informational...

Using a unique hand collected sample of professional connections between finance ministers and the directors and top executives of the three largest credit rating agencies for 38 European sovereigns between January 2000 and November 2017, we show that professional connections result in higher...

Using 311 sovereign rating actions by the three leading global rating agencies between January and August 2020, we show that severity of sovereign ratings actions is not affected by the intensity of the COVID-19 health crisis (proxied by case and mortality rates). We find that economic...

We investigate the permanent and transitory effects of sovereign credit ratings on time-varying stock and bond market correlations with their respective regional markets for a sample of up to nineteen emerging countries over the period from 1 January 1994 to 1 July 2007. We find that stock and...

Credit rating agencies have been an important determinant of countries' cost of capital in the last couple of decades. This paper studies the effect of the governance of modern central banks on the ratings assigned by the credit rating agencies Standard and Poor's and Moody's. Until recently,...

In the 1970s, while a leftist military dictatorship ruled Peru, more than 22 million acres of cultivated or grazing farmland – one-third of Peru's total agricultural acreage, or seven-and-a-half times the land area of Connecticut – were expropriated from thousands of large owners as part of...

This study examines the determinants of farm loan delinquencies, and in particular, the influence of multiple loans and multiple lenders on delinquency. The number of lenders used by a borrower, the number of loans outstanding, and the interaction of the two factors are all positively related to...

This paper investigates the importance of having a sovereign credit rating for a country's financial development. After controlling for endogeneity and selection bias, we compare different aspects of the financial sector and the capital markets of recently rated countries with otherwise similar,...

Default of a sovereign entity was usually considered an extremely rare event. Similarly, countries were not commonly supposed to go bankrupt and, therefore, government bonds are usually considered a good proxy of risk-free rates, notwithstanding the more or less recent cases of default and debt...