In socio-economic sciences the RePEc network (Research Papers in Economics) has become an essential source both for the spread of existing and new economic research. Furthermore the calculation of rankings for authors and academic institutions play a central role. We provide some cautionary...

We conducted a global study of the long-term issuer ratings of nonfinancial firms from Standard and Poor's Ratings Services (S&P) for the period 1998-2003. Specifically, we focused on the solicited versus unsolicited ratings and sample-selection bias in the analysis. Unlike the literature, we...