It has been a puzzle why foreign firms obtain credit ratings by global rating agencies such as S&P or Moody's rather than from their home country's rating agencies even though the global raters typically assign lower credit ratings when these foreign firms issue bonds in their home currencies....

Previous studies show that the unsolicited ratings of S&P and Fitch are lower than the solicited ratings assigned by these two agencies. The unsolicited ratings of S&P and Fitch are based on publicly available information for a firm. However, no previous study has examined the unsolicited...