Credit risk measurement and management become more important in all financial institutions in the light of the current financial crisis and the global recession. This particularly applies to most of the complex structured financing forms whose risk cannot be quantified with com-mon rating...

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the backbone of most Asian economies. The main obstacle to the development of the SME sector is the lack of stable finance. Considering the bank-dominated characteristic of economies in Asia, banks are the main source of financing, and the lack of a...

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...

This paper internalizes a new approach to measure the direct and pure impact of credit rating changes on the cost of debt. We analyze loan contracts with rating-based performance pricing (RBPP) provisions. They ex ante link interest spreads to the credit ratings. We examine a large sample of...

In this paper, we empirically investigate two economic issues (1) the factors that affect the primary market spread on non-U.S. asset-backed securities and (2) whether investors rely solely on credit ratings and ignore other credit-related factors. We do so by using a panel-data fixed-effects...

In this paper we use credit rating data from two large Swedish banks to elicit evidence on banks' loan monitoring ability. For these banks, our tests reveal that banks' credit ratings indeed include valuable private information from monitoring, as theory suggests. However, our tests also reveal...

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...

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...

This paper develops a semiparametric, ordered-response model of credit rating in which ratings are equilibrium outcomes of a stylized cheap-talk game. The proposed model allows the choice probability to be an unknown function of multiple indices permitting flexible interaction, non-monotonicity,...

In this paper, the authors use credit rating data from two Swedish banks to elicit evidence on banks' loan monitoring ability. They test the banks' ability to forecast credit bureau ratings, and vice versa, and show that bank ratings are able to predict future credit bureau ratings. This is...