The paper makes an assessment of the progress made in developing local debt markets in emerging Asia. Market development has been limited by hurdles confronting borrowers and lenders, current and potential liquidity providers, and insufficient support from government policies and regulations....

This paper examines the spillover effects of sovereign rating news on European financial markets during the period 2007-2010. Our main finding is that sovereign rating downgrades have statistically and economically significant spillover effects both across countries and financial markets. The...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to provide a grammar for dissecting the financial crisis that began in the housing finance market of industrialized nations in 2007, rapidly becoming a general credit crisis and spreading to all parts of the world and causing a global recession of gigantic...

This paper critically reviews the debate on CRAs and, in the light thereof, analyses the European regulatory approach to CRAs, thereby combining insights from economics and law. We first provide some basic background on the function of CRAs. Thereafter, we focus on the two main tasks for which...

This paper analyzes whether soft information improves predictive accuracy of a bank’s internal rating by better forecasting future credit defaults. We use a unique hand-collected database of 389 small loans granted by a French social bank (credit cooperative) dealing with (very) small...

This paper focuses on the credit rating of Southern Italy firms, by using theMulti Objective Rating Evaluation Model (MORE), based on the accounting datataken from the Bureau van Dijk's Amadeus database. Solvency classes are set byfirms' size and sectoral breakdown. With reference to...

In the United States, over the last decade, credit rating agencies have benefited from a special regulatory regime that even before the burst of the financial crisis had started to raise criticism. The three main problems identified by either regulators and scholars concern first the competition...

Rating agencies report ordinal ratings in discrete classes. We question the market’s implicit assumption that agencies define their classes on identical scales, e.g., that AAA by Standard & Poor’s is equivalent to Aaa by Moody’s. To this end, we develop a non-parametric...

Public projects typically generate both monetary revenue and social benefits that cannot be monetized. We show that a government concerned with the credit rating of its debt should put different discount rates on these two aspects. The credit rating reflects the probability of default on the...