Local governments often seek credit ratings from multiple agencies for external financing. Rating shopping and catering, the incentives of the rating agencies, and the career incentives of the analysts issuing the ratings may render the ratings interdependent. This paper estimates the feedback...

We investigate whether credit rating agencies incorporate climate risk in their rating models. As climate risk is not well defined, we implement several identification strategies using a sample of U.S. cities whose creditworthiness should vary with climate risk–related disruptions to their...

This study identifies five distinctive stages of the current global financial crisis: the meltdown of the subprime mortgage market; spillovers into broader credit market; the liquidity crisis epitomized by the fallout of Northern Rock, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers with counterparty risk...

We investigate the relationship between credit rating events and credit default swap spreads for EU countries around the Subprime and European Debt Crises. Using event studies and OLS regressions we analyse the behavior of CDS spreads before, around and after credit rating events. Our results...

Relying on a perspective borrowed from monetary policy announcements and introducing an econometric twist in the traditional event study analysis, we document the existence of an "event risk transfer", namely a significant credit risk transmission from the sovereign to the corporate sector after...

Certifiers contribute to the sound functioning of markets by reducing a symmetric information. They, however, have been heavily criticized during the 2008-09 financial crisis. This paper investigates on which side of the market a monopolistic profit-maximizing certifier offers his service. If...

The boom in ESG investing has created a demand for information. ESG raters have stepped up to fill this gap, but are under scrutiny for inaccurate ratings. This inaccuracy is often measured by the divergence (low correlation) of ratings. We provide a model of ESG ratings competition, where...

The authors examine the effect of split environmental, social and governance (ESG) ratings on information asymmetry, corporate value and trading behavior. The authors test the risk-based hypothesis and the optimism-bias hypothesis on the relationship between diverging opinions and future stock...

We measure credit risk premia---prices for bearing corporate default risk in excess of expected default losses---using Markit CDS and Moody's Analytics EDF data. We find dramatic variation over time in credit risk premia, with peaks in 2002, during the global financial crisis of 2008-09, and in...