...Samuel B. Bonsall, IV; John B. Donovan; Eric R. Holzman; Xue Wang; Daniel G. Yang ABSTRACT Despite private access to managers, issuer-paid credit rating agencies (CRAs) are often criticized for failing to promptly reflect material negative private information in their ratings and being ineffective...

...Vincent Zhang (Qiru) ABSTRACT In 2010, the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board proposed a rule change requiring the display of current credit ratings on the EMMA website, a centralized repository of municipal bond information. Before the rule change, current credit ratings were freely available...

...Riddha Basu; James P. Naughton; Clare Wang ABSTRACT We find that corporate credit rating changes have an effect on firms' voluntary disclosure behavior that is independent of the information they convey about firm fundamentals. Our analyses exploit two separate quasi-experimental settings...

... settings. First, we show that the equity market response to credit rating changes increases in the level of information imprecision before the announcement. Second, we show that bond-market professionals' ability to charge a premium to smaller investors, relative to larger investors, increases...

...Brian Akins ABSTRACT This study finds that better reporting quality is associated with less uncertainty about credit risk as captured by disagreement among the credit rating agencies. The results also show that reporting quality is more important in reducing uncertainty when debt market...

...Ed deHaan ABSTRACT Credit ratings on many financial instruments failed to accurately portray default risk before the global financial crisis. I find no decline in the performance of corporate credit ratings during or after the crisis, indicating that the failures of ratings on financial...

...S. Jane Jollineau; Lloyd J. Tanlu; Amanda Winn ABSTRACT: Regulators and the financial press have criticized credit rating agencies (CRAs) for exacerbating the financial crisis by providing overly optimistic debt ratings. Allegedly, CRAs departed from their quantitative models in order to please...

...Mary E. Barth; Gaizka Ormazabal; Daniel J. Taylor ABSTRACT This study examines the sources of credit risk associated with asset securitizations and whether credit-rating agencies and the bond market differ in their assessment of this risk. Measuring credit risk using credit ratings, we find...

... attract upgrades to their credit ratings because they send a positive signal by submitting to an audit when this is no longer legally required. In contrast, companies that dispense with being audited suffer downgrades to their ratings because avoiding an audit sends a negative signal and removes its...