Using an international sample of more than 65,000 rating actions by Fitch, Moody's and S&P, we analyze the effect of the Dodd-Frank Act on credit ratings. We document that (i) rating report content changes significantly after Dodd-Frank and (ii) show, by exploiting within firm-quarter variation,...

We investigate whether credit rating agencies systematically follow each other's rating decisions. Therefore we rely on the rotation of rating analysts within credit rating agencies and their impact on the rating. Using this institutional setup we can disentangle causal herding behavior from...

In this paper we investigate whether race and ethnicity influenced subprime loan pricing during 2005, the peak of the subprime mortgage expansion. We combine loan-level data on the performance of non-prime securitized mortgages with individual- and neighborhood-level data on racial and ethnic...