We use dynamic panel analysis to examine whether credit rating agencies achieve what they claim to achieve, namely, look into the future when assigning their ratings. We find that Moody's ratings help predict individual financial ratios over a horizon of up to five years. Ratings also predict a...

The presence of cross-sectionally correlated error terms invalidates much inferential theory of panel data models. Recently work by Pesaran (2006) has suggested a method which makes use of cross-sectional averages to provide valid inference for stationary panel regressions with multifactor error...

Mundlak ("On the Pooling of Time Series and Cross-Section Data", Econometrica, Vol. 46 (1978),pp. 69-85) showed that when individual effects are correlated with the explanatory variables in an error component (EC) model, the GLS estimator is given by the within. In this paper we bring out some...