We consider 1927 borrowers from 54 countries who had a credit rating by both Moody s and S&P as of the end of 1998, and their subsequent default history up to the end of 2002. Viewing bond ratings as predicted probabilities of default, we show that it is unlikely that both agencies are well...

This paper empirically examines the role of soft information in the competitive interaction between relationship and transaction banks. Soft information can be interpreted as a private signal about the quality of a firm that is observable to a relationship bank, but not to a transaction bank. We...

In this paper we investigate the implications of providing loan officers with a compensation structure that rewards loan volume and penalizes poor performance versus a fixed wage unrelated to performance. We study detailed transaction information for more than 45,000 loans issued by 240 loan...

This paper investigates whether the stock market reacts to unsolicited ratings for a sample of S&P rated firms from January 1996 to December 2005. We first analyze the stock market reaction associated with the assignment of an initial unsolicited rating. We find evidence that this reaction is...

Rating downgrades are known to make subsequent downgrades more likely. We analyze the impact of this 'downward momentum' on credit portfolio risk. Using S&P ratings from 1996 to 2005, we estimate a transition matrix that is insensitive to and a second matrix that is sensitive to previous...