Firm circumstances change but rating agencies may not make timely revisions to their ratings, thereby increasing information asymmetry between firms and the market. We examine whether firms time the securities market before a credit rating agency publicly reveals its decision to change a firm's...

Using a dataset which records banks' ongoing requests of information from small commercial borrowers, we examine when banks use financial statements to monitor borrowers after loan origination. We find banks request financial statements for half the loans and this variation is related to...

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...

In Asia, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) account for the major share of employment and dominate domestic economies, yet providing these companies with access to finance is a challenge across the region. Asian economies are often characterized as having bank-dominated financial systems...

We test the hypothesis that financial institutions and other regulated institutional investors benefit from relatively uninformative credit ratings. Using credit ratings without regulatory implications as a benchmark, we show that Moody's certifies riskier bonds as investment grade. This...

This study investigates how credit ratings affect firm innovation. By exploiting sovereign downgrades as an exogenous shock to corporate credit ratings, we show that a sovereign downgrade leads to significant reductions in innovation among firms that have a rating at the sovereign bound ex ante....

In July 2013, Moody's unexpectedly increased the amount of equity credit that speculative-grade firms receive for preferred stock from 50% to 100%. Firms affected by the rule change were suddenly considered less levered by Moody's even though their balance sheets did not change. These firms...

This study revisits the relation between corporate performance and corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the context of a major shift in firms' credit risk status. Relying on firms' credit rating as a performance indicator, we examine whether firms under the scrutiny of rating agencies...

An enduring puzzle is why credit rating agencies (CRAs) use a few categories to describe credit qualities lying in a continuum, even when ratings coarseness reduces welfare. We model a cheap-talk game in which a CRA assigns positive weights to the divergent goals of issuing firms and investors....

Changes in corporate credit ratings affect subsequent capital structure decisions. The results for listed companies in our U.S. sample support Kisgen's (2006, 2009) credit rating-capital structure hypothesis. However, applying a system GMM system approach, the implications of this hypothesis are...