This paper investigates the potential impact of the growing influence of the opinions of credit rating agencies (CRAs) on market dynamics. This impact can be seen as a consequence of the information content of the ratings themselves or indirectly as a consequence of the "hardwiring" of ratings...

We test if and how banks adjust their lending in response to disaster risk in the form of a natural catastrophe striking its customers: the 2013 Elbe flooding. The flood affected firms in East and South Germany, and we identify shocked banks based on bank-firm relationships gathered for more...

This paper applies a four-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach proposed by Fried et al. (1999) to measure the operational environment-adjusted efficiency of sixty mutual funds in Taiwan from 2006 to 2010. We adopt the approach for adjusting negative output as suggested by Lovell and...

Credit default swaps ("CDSs") were widely blamed as a primary cause of the recent financial crisis; CDSs fomented panic as the price of credit protection spiked and contributed to the Federal Reserve's decision to bail out American International Group. To reduce the likelihood that credit...

We show that accounting information releases generate large and immediate price impacts, i.e. jumps, in credit default swap (CDS) spreads. Our approach is multivariate, which allows for identification of information events under the presence of confounding news, such as credit events and other...

Financial constraints and risk taking are two well-established determinants of firm performance, however, no research analyzes how these variables are connected in the context of a high risk environment. Using data from micro-finance clients in Tanzania, we derive a novel financial constraints...

We examine two competing views regarding the impact of competition among credit rating agencies on rating quality: the view that rating agencies do not sacrifice their reputation by inflating firm ratings and the view that competition among rating agencies arising from the conflict of interest...

This study explores whether taking into account variables for real earnings management improves specification of the default prediction model based on the Z-score methodology for Chinese listed companies. We demonstrate that the Z-score model proposed by Altman (1968) overestimates the survival...

This study finds that better reporting quality is associated with less uncertainty about credit risk as captured by disagreement among the credit rating agencies. The results also show that reporting quality is more important in reducing uncertainty when debt market participants have less access...