The role of credit rating agencies has been questioned in the recent years. Existing empirical studies provide mixed evidence on the informational value of bond ratings for financial investors. In this study we examine the relationship between bond ratings and credit spreads for US corporate...

This paper provides an innovative theoretical model and empirical evidence for how the illiquidity of corporate bonds, as trading noise, dampens firm-specific information incorporated into bond prices. We find a negative relation between bond illiquidity and synchronicity, and this empirical...

Taking a cue from the assertion that “loose lips sink markets” (Carmassi and Micossi, 2010), this paper investigates to what extent and why political communication has had an impact on the sovereign bond spreads of selected euro area countries over the German Bund. Drawing on 25,000 news...

We study the term structure of variance (total risk), systematic and idiosyncratic risk. Consistent with the expectations hypothesis, we find that, for the entire market, the slope of the term structure of variance is mainly informative about the path of future variance. Thus, there is little...

The accuracy of measuring credit risk directly decides on the interest on credit, which has to be paid when raising a credit, and the amount of capital to keep in reserve by a firm. The structural credit risk model proposed by Merton (1974) lays the groundwork for the assessment of a firm's...

This is an Internet Appendix with additional tables for Zhang, Zhang, and Zhao (2022, available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=3519341). The abstract of the paper is as follows:Using a dataset on syndicated loan primary market pricing adjustments, we examine whether relationship banks’...

We find that Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) actions (especially rate cuts) narrowed corporate credit spreads during the pre-crisis period of 2002-2007. During the 2008 crisis period, we find that both conventional cuts and quantitative easing decreased spreads. But FOMC inactions caused...

Using a new dataset on syndicated loan primary market pricing adjustments, we examine whether relationship banks' information advantage facilitates price discovery in loan issuances. We find that the lead bank makes fewer adjustments to the initial pricing terms of a syndicated loan and shortens...

We find that recommendations of sell-side analysts on a particular stock are negatively influenced by the quality of the other stocks they are recommending that month, even after controlling for explicit benchmarks. This implies that if an analyst is rating a strong pool in a month, the best...

How strong has been the effect of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) on systemic risk in sovereign bond markets? Was the increase in credit spreads relative to triple-A benchmarks which followed the GFC the result of higher sovereign default risk or the result of a re-pricing that reflected...