We explore the impact of director social capital on credit ratings. Social capital is often associated with trust and cultivated through one's personal networks. We show that firms which employ well-connected directors benefit with a higher credit rating. This result is amplified for firms that...

We report on the current state and important older findings of empirical studies on corporate credit ratings and their relationship to ratings of other entities. Specifically, we consider the results of three lines of research: The correlation of credit ratings and corporate default, the...

Using a comprehensive set of firms from 57 countries over the 2000–2016 period, we examine the relation between institutional investor horizons and firm-level credit ratings. Controlling for firm- and country-specific factors, as well as for firm fixed effects, we find that larger long-term...

We find that large shareholders of Moody's (affiliated investors) abnormally decrease their stock ownerships in a firm before its downgrade by Moody's. This finding is stronger for informationally opaque stocks and active affiliated investors, significant only after Moody's initial public...

Credit risk rating is shown to be a relevant determinant in order to estimate good corporate governance and to self-optimize capital structure. The conclusion is argued from a study on a selected (and justified) sample of (182) companies listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SHSE) and the...

Using the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 as a natural experiment, we document a non-monotonic relation between board independence and credit ratings. Ratings are upgraded with an exogenous increase of board independence only when independence is low, which is consistent with the costs as well as...

This doctoral dissertation examined the legal liabilities of credit rating agencies (CRAs) in providing credit ratings of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), which are pointed to cause the current financial crisis. Until now, CRAs abused the favorable legal and regulatory environments of...

We exploit the 1997 Asian financial crisis to show that credit rating concerns affect firms' corporate governance. We treat the crisis as an exogenous shock that led to improvements in the informativeness of Korea's credit rating system and find that credit rating concerns affect corporate...

I present the first study that systematically examines the implications of ESG adoption for the credit ratings business. I find that, with a recent move by Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s towards incorporating ESG issues into their analysis, credit ratings positively reflect firms with lower...

We investigate the network structure of syndicated lending markets and evaluate the impact of lenders' network centrality, considered as measures of their experience and reputation, on borrowing costs. We show that the market for syndicated loans is a “small world” characterized by large...