Over the past decade there has been mixed evidence on the lead-lag relation between issuer-paid and investor-paid credit rating agencies. We investigate the lead-lag relationship for changes in bond ratings (BRs) and financial strength ratings (FSRs), for the US insurance industry, where FSRs...

This study investigates whether banks and insurance corporations perform regulatory arbitrage by buying bonds with inflated credit ratings. We argue that credit rating based capital requirements incentivize banks and insurance corporations to hold more bonds with inflated credit ratings. We...

This article explores the question of whether bond insurers are able to sufficiently evaluate the credit risk of insured bonds, the answer to which would determine the future of municipal bond insurance. A sample of insured municipal bonds is investigated to determine whether bond insurance...

Economic theory predicts that credit ratings provide monitoring and certification benefits that can lower the cost of borrowing. This study that compares offering yield spreads of rated and unrated corporate bonds does not find support for this prediction, when controlling for issuers’ credit...

Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs), an important financial intermediary acts as a gatekeeper to the financial markets by influencing the investor and regulating the issuer’s access to the financial markets. In India, Securities and Exchange board of India (SEBI) brought rating agencies under its...

Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs) acts an important financial intermediary and gatekeeper. They work with regulators in framing policies and laws for regulating the market. They are mentioned in many statutory regulations of SEBI, IRDA, RBI, NSIC etc. There are seven registered credit rating...

A firm's current leverage ratio is one of the core characteristics of credit quality used in statistical default prediction models. Based on the capital structure literature, which shows that leverage is mean-reverting to a target leverage, we forecast future leverage ratios and include them in...

This paper provides the first empirical investigation of the influence of credit default swaps (CDS) on the surge in subprime mortgage defaults, which is widely believed to be a driving force in the 2008/2009 financial crisis. In the years just before the 2008/2009 financial crisis, private...

We offer the first empirical evidence on the adverse effect of credit default swap (CDS) coverage on subprime mortgage defaults. Using a large database of privately securitized mortgages, we find that higher defaults concentrate in mortgage pools with concurrent CDS coverage and within these...

Insurance companies often follow highly correlated investment strategies. As major investors in corporate bonds, their investment commonalities subject investors to fire-sale risk when regulatory restrictions prompt widespread divestment of a bond following a rating downgrade. Reflective of...