In this paper, we examine whether credit rating agencies consider a CEO’s general skills as a credit risk factor when assessing an entity’s overall creditworthiness and find that generalist CEOs are associated with lower credit ratings. The findings suggest that the presence of generalist...

Our study examines whether CEOs’ birth order can predict firms’ credit ratings. Consistent with studies that document a positive relationship in the general population between being firstborn and being conservative, our study finds that firms managed by firstborn CEOs tend to have higher...

A recent trend is that firms prefer to hire generalist CEOs with transferable skills (across firms or industries) over hiring specialist CEOs, but the consequences of this trend are unclear. In this study, we examine whether credit rating agencies consider a CEO’s general skills as a credit...

The 2008 crisis made clear that credit rating agencies (CRAs) can contribute to systemic financial risk. Surprisingly, post-crisis reforms have hardly addressed the underlying problems, including rating agencies' methodologies, their ratings' homogeneity, and widespread market reliance on these...