This paper empirically examines the determinants of sovereign credit ratings using panel data of a sample of 86 countries for 1993-2013. It further investigates whether the countries' average credit rating differs for crisis and non-crisis periods, as well as for the different regions where the...

We show that sovereign debt impairments can have a significant impact on financial markets and real economies through a credit ratings channel. Specifically, we find that firms reduce their investment and reliance on credit markets due to a rising cost of debt capital following a sovereign...

Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs) have been in the regulator's spotlight since the subprime crisis occurred and they remain under criticism due to suspected conflicts of interest that could arise from clients soliciting a rating. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the current discussion on...

We study the causal effect of bank credit rating downgrades on the supply of bank lending. The identification strategy exploits the asymmetric impact of sovereign downgrades on the ratings of banks at the sovereign bound relative to bank that are not at the bound as a result of rating agencies'...

In this paper we study the sovereign credit rating determinants of Visegrad Four countries in the period 1993-2012. The sovereign ratings in this study come from four major credit rating agencies namely Moody's, S&P, Fitch and R&I. Besides macroeconomic and socio-political indicators we analyse...

Objective: The objective of the article is to identify the determinants of the EU countries’ sovereign credit ratings with a particular focus on the impact of the euro area crisis. Research Design & Methods: The study is conducted for the 28 EU countries for the years 2004-2018. The research...

We examine the effect of firm credit rating downgrades on the pricing and structure of syndicated bank loans following rating downgrades in the firms' countries of domicile. We find that the sovereign ceiling policies used by credit rating agencies create a disproportionally adverse impact on...

The investment of foreign exchange reserves or other asset portfolios requires an assessment of the credit quality of investment counterparties. Traditionally, foreign exchange reserve and other asset managers relied on credit rating agencies (CRAs) as the main source of information for credit...

This paper examines the joint behaviour of sovereign ratings and their macroeconomic/financial determinants (namely uncertainty, GDP growth, government debt-to-GDP ratio, investment-to-GDP ratio and the fiscal balance-to-GDP ratio) in a multivariate Panel Vector Autoregressive (PVAR) framework....