Examining how climate and other environmental regulatory risks affect bond risk and pricing, we find that bond credit ratings and yield spreads appear to be influenced by a firm's environmental performance along with its regulatory conditions. Firms with poor environmental profiles tend to have...

Investor concerns about climate and other environmental regulatory risks suggest that these risks should affect corporate bond risk assessment and pricing. We test this hypothesis and find that firms with poor environmental profiles or high carbon footprints tend to have lower credit ratings and...

We analyse a sample of funds and other securities each assigned a total rating score by an unknown expert entity. The scores are based on a number of risk and complexity factors, each assigned a category (factor score) of Low, Medium, or High by the expert entity. A principal component analysis...

We analyse a sample of funds and other securities each assigned a total rating score by an unknown expert entity. The scores are based on a number of risk and complexity factors, each assigned a category (factor score) of Low, Medium, or High by the expert entity. A principal component analysis...

In this paper we apply a novel approach to identifying the qualitative judgement of the rating committee in sovereign credit ratings. We extend the traditional regression with new measures - sentiment and subjectivity scores - obtained by textual sentiment analysis methods. By using an ordered...

Nowadays, investors seek beyond the financial performance of their investments, including Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) criteria in the decision-making process. To this effect, there are currently suppliers who offer different methodologies to evaluate the ESG factors that...

Using a dataset of Home Equity Loan securities issued up to June 2007 and rated by Moody’s and/or S&P, this paper investigates how discretionary ratings are priced by the market. To this end, a measure of relative rating inflation (Rating Bias) observable at issuance is proposed. The way...

Rating agencies produce ratings used by investors, but obtain most of their revenue from issuers, leading to a conflict of interest. We employ a unique data set on the use of non-rating services, and the associated payments, in India, to test if this conflict affects ratings quality. Agencies...

This paper provides evidence of ratings shopping in the corporate bond market. By estimating systematic differences in agencies' biases about any given firm's bonds, I show that new bonds are more likely to be rated by agencies that are positively biased towards the firm---a pattern that is...

This paper compares conflict of interest incentives and reputational concerns of credit rating agencies (CRAs) in the context of the subprime crisis. We argue that, during up-market periods, ratings levels are affected by both a strong tendency for alignment across CRAs and ratings...