Die Finanzmärkte reagieren in der gegenwärtigen Staatsschuldenkrise offensichtlich auf Meinungsäußerungen der marktbeherrschenden Ratingagenturen – selbst wenn diese in scheinbarem Widerspruch zur vorherigen Bewertung ökonomischer Fundamentaldaten stehen. Das führt dazu, dass private...

An online survey among undergraduate macroeconomics instructors reveals that roughly half of them were scared when the crisis erupted and remain wary that more may be in the offing. As regards teaching, courses feature much the same lineups of models as they did before the crisis. A striking...

This paper asks whether rating agencies played a passive role or were an active driving force during Europe's sovereign debt crisis. We address this by estimating relationships between sovereign debt ratings and macroeconomic and structural variables. We then use these equ-ations to decompose...