This paper explores the possibility of remedial intervention against the credit rating oligopoly under the competition rules. It is divided in six parts. Following an introduction, Part II provides an overview of the credit rating industry. Part III demonstrates that there is a possible economic...

There are few things more constant in life than the rise and fall of financial markets. When markets crash, however, we are forced to restore them while learning from our mistakes. In the wake of the recent subprime mortgage crisis, Congress has drastically but deservedly overhauled the...

The naming of eleven banks as “too big to fail (TBTF)” in 1984 led bond raters to raise their ratings on new bond issues of TBTF banks about a notch relative to those of other, unnamed banks. The relationship between bond spreads and ratings for the TBTF banks tended to flatten after that...

Do credit ratings affect the information content of corporate disclosure? Using novel data on rating analysts to obtain exogenous variation in rating information, we find that greater uncertainty in credit ratings increases the quality of information disclosed by the firm. This is consistent...

This paper studies how collateral affects bond yields. Using a large dataset of public bonds, we document that collateralized debt has higher yield than general debt, after controlling for credit rating. Our model of agency problems between managers and claimholders explains this puzzling result...

Using a unique hand collected sample of professional connections between finance ministers and the directors and top executives of the three largest credit rating agencies for 38 European sovereigns between January 2000 and November 2017, we show that professional connections result in higher...

We compare the structure and performance of private (non-GSE) mortgage-backed securities sold by large issuers vs. those sold by small issuers over the period 2000-2006. Securities sold by large issuers have less subordination — a greater fraction of the deal receiving AAA rating — than...

Default of a sovereign entity was usually considered an extremely rare event. Similarly, countries were not commonly supposed to go bankrupt and, therefore, government bonds are usually considered a good proxy of risk-free rates, notwithstanding the more or less recent cases of default and debt...