This paper models competition among credit rating agencies as an auction. Equilibrium ratings give a distorted representation of agencies' true assessment of quality, because the agencies choose their ratings strategically. I quantify the distortion in ratings for individual commercial...

The increase in female employment and participation rates is one of the most dramatic economic changes to have taken place during the last century. However, while the employment rate of married women more than doubled during the last fifty years, that of unmarried women remained almost constant....