Since 2011, Morningstar has issued Morningstar Analyst Ratings on many of the largest mutual funds in the United States. In June 2017, Morningstar launched the Morningstar Quantitative Rating™ to provide a forward‐looking rating on all mutual funds. Morningstar uses a “robo‐rater”...

A rater is paid by a seller, observes a signal about the seller's product, and issues a public cheap-talk rating for potential buyers. I characterize the partition of the rater's information into ratings issued following public payments from the seller to the rater, and ratings issued when the...

Building on the idea that precision of credit ratings matters for the efficiency of investors' portfolio decisions, the paper analyzes the equilibrium precision of ratings. Our analysis explains why ratings are noisy, exhibit rating inflation and vary across asset classes and over the economic...