Do rating agencies increase or decrease financial market stability? This paper analyzes whether credit rating agencies may help to avoid inefficient self-fulfilling credit defaults. If investors follow risk-dominant strategies, we show that rating announcements and investors' private information...

We evaluate the viability of credit default swaps (CDS) spreads as substitutes for credit ratings. We focus on CDS spreads based on the obligations of financial institutions, particularly fifteen large financial institutions that were prominently involved in the recent financial crisis. Our...

Credit rating is an index for classifying credit risk that attributes scores based on investor trust and confidence in the company issuing bonds in the financial market. This article studies rating as signs of default (insolvency) in companies. Fitch Ratings was used due to the transparency of...

This paper takes a look at two areas where the subprime crisis has triggered debate and is paving the way for possible movement towards greater global regulation: international banking supervision and the role of credit rating agencies. It surveys the varied range of opinions on the role that...

Over the past ten years, credit rating agencies have come under intense criticism from both practitioners and academics, first for their failure to identify problems resulting in bankruptcies at Enron and Worldcom and second for providing overly optimistic ratings for structured finance...

This paper presents a formal model of a credit rating agency. I study the consequences of the transition from an “investor-pays” model to an “issuer-pays” model on the quality standard of credit ratings chosen by the agency. I find that such a transition is likely to generate a...

We analyze a model where investors use a credit rating to decide whether to finance a firm. The rating quality depends on unobservable effort exerted by a credit rating agency (CRA). We study optimal compensation schemes for the CRA when a planner, the firm, or investors order the rating. Rating...