This paper explores the risk structure of interest rates. More specifically, we ask whether yields on industrial and commercial bonds indicate that market participants base their evaluations of a bond issue's default risk on agency ratings or on publically available financial statistics. Using a...

The Dodd-Frank Act (Section 939B) enacted in 2010 repealed credit rating agencies' (CRAs) exemption from Regulation Fair Disclosure. Testing whether CRAs continue to provide new information to the market after the repeal, we find that the significant pre-repeal stock price responses to rating...