During the past forty years, the simultaneous, symbiotic growth of financial innovation, disintermediation and deregulation has created an environment with extremely complex, opaque investment instruments. That system has now collapsed. At the very center of the crisis are a small group of...

Using an international sample of more than 65,000 rating actions by Fitch, Moody's and S&P, we analyze the effect of the Dodd-Frank Act on credit ratings. We document that (i) rating report content changes significantly after Dodd-Frank and (ii) show, by exploiting within firm-quarter variation,...

The history of rating agency reform has not been inspiring. Until recently, it seemed stuck in an ever-repeating cycle of futility. A crisis would spur calls for reform, hearings would be conducted, the SEC would issue proposals and requests for comments, and ultimately, nothing would happen -...

The credit crisis that started in the American mortgage subprime market in 2007 is having profound social and economic consequences. In this context, lawmakers, regulators, and commentators have questioned the role of rating agencies in the market turmoil. In light of the critiques, a strong...

We exploit an investor-paid rating agency's designation as a Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization (NRSRO) to test whether this certification affects the agency's information production. We use a certified issuer-paid agency as a benchmark and find robust evidence that the...

This paper examines how the information quality of ratings from an issuer-paid rating agency (Standard and Poor's) responds to the entry of an investor-paid rating agency, the Egan-Jones Rating Company (EJR). By comparing S&P's ratings quality before and after EJR initiates coverage of each...

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...

In the United States and Europe faulty credit ratings and flawed rating processes are widely perceived as being among the key contributors to the global financial crisis. That has brought them under intense scrutiny and led to proposals for radical reforms. The ongoing debate, while centered in...