We analyze the impact of sovereign rating changes on European corporate loan spreads. We demonstrate that sovereign downgrades lead to significant increases in the spread of loans to domestic firms. We find evidence that the negative effects of a sovereign downgrade are widespread across all...

We find that large shareholders of Moody's (affiliated investors) abnormally decrease their stock ownerships in a firm before its downgrade by Moody's. This finding is stronger for informationally opaque stocks and active affiliated investors, significant only after Moody's initial public...

We explore the impact of director social capital on credit ratings. Social capital is often associated with trust and cultivated through one's personal networks. We show that firms which employ well-connected directors benefit with a higher credit rating. This result is amplified for firms that...

Economic theory predicts that credit ratings provide monitoring and certification benefits that can lower the cost of borrowing. This study that compares offering yield spreads of rated and unrated corporate bonds does not find support for this prediction, when controlling for issuers’ credit...

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...

Our study examines firms’ motivation to issue hybrid bonds. Hybrid bonds have been issued in more than 15 different countries around the world and have been the most relevant class of hybrid securities in these countries since 2005. A hybrid bond offers several structuring opportunities....

We estimate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on credit risk changes on a large sample of Polish SME firms. The Altman Z"-Score model, which has proven to be a powerful and robust bankruptcy prediction model across many industries and countries, is used to assess over 1,000 SMEs from seven...

Climate change can be a source of financial risk. This paper examines how credit rating agencies accepted by the Eurosystem incorporate climate change risk in their credit ratings. It also analyses how rating agencies disclose their assessments of climate change risks to rating users. The paper...

Harnessing CEO overconfidence whilst exploiting their risk appetite and over-optimism has long been of interest to management scholars and firms. We find that overconfident CEOs’ reluctance to access external financing indicates that they reduce their acquisition activity at high rating...

We investigate the association of a firm’s related party transactions (RPTs) with the firm’s credit ratings. Consistent with the agency theory view, we argue that RPTs, because of financial reporting risks, rent extraction, consumption of private benefits, and entrenchment, are associated...