Credit rating agencies have been heavily criticized both for providing overly optimistic ratings for structured finance products and the timeliness of their rating changes for financial institutions hit hard by the 2007 to 2009 crisis. While the role of rating agencies in the structured finance...

Over the past ten years, credit rating agencies have come under intense criticism from both practitioners and academics, first for their failure to identify problems resulting in bankruptcies at Enron and Worldcom and second for providing overly optimistic ratings for structured finance...

Over the past ten years, credit rating agencies have come under intense criticism from both practitioners and academics, first for their failure to identify problems resulting in bankruptcies at Enron and Worldcom and second for providing overly optimistic ratings for structured finance...

This paper studies the effect of senior lender control, as measured by bank loan covenants, on the pricing of new bond issues. We find a U-shaped relation between the number of financial covenants on a firm's loan contract and the bond yield spread. Our results suggest that bondholders initially...