Failures of banks' governance and risk management functions have been identified as key causes of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. This article reviews the empirical literature that investigates the relationship between governance structures and risk management functions as well as their impact...

We present a statistical test for the long-term calibration in rating systems that can deal with overlapping time windows as required by the guidelines of the European Banking Authority (EBA), which apply to major financial institutions in the European System. In accordance with regulation,...

This paper examines the issues of the aggregation and comparison of the credit ratings of various economic agents for risk management purposes in a commercial bank. The empirical results of the study make it possible to increase the assessment of credit risks based on the constructed system of...

We find that Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs) see through transitory shocks to credit risk that stem from transitory shocks to equity prices, while market-based measures of credit risk do not. For a given stock return, CRAs are significantly less likely to downgrade firms with transitory shocks...

Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht, welche Faktoren einen Einfluss auf die Beurteilung der Zahlungsfähigkeit eines Unternehmens haben. Dazu werden zwei empirische Untersuchungen durchgeführt. Zunächst wird geklärt, welche makroökonomischen Faktoren und unternehmensspezifischen Kennzahlen...

The timeliness of the credit rating of a firm has been frequently called into question over the previous two decades. This paper examines whether changes in credit ratings can be updated more frequently than at the frequency of updates in the accounting data. The paper finds that, when market...

This paper evaluates the characteristics of a Point in Time (PiT) rating approach for the estimation of firms' credit risk in terms of procyclicality. To this end I first estimate a logit model for the probability default (PD) of a set of Italian non-financial firms during the period 2006-2012,...

While credit rating agencies are of central importance to credit markets, it is still unclear how credit ratings decisions are being made. Are credit rating quantitatively hard-wired? Or, do ratings represent a more holistic approach to the evaluation of creditworthiness? I evaluate the...

This paper revisits recent investigations into the role credit ratings play in the marginal financing behavior of firms. While it has long been documented that credit ratings may be an important determinant of firm capital structure policy, academics have only recently subjected this motivation...