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Report
Determinants and impacts of sovereign credit ratings
In this article, we present the first systematic analysis of the sovereign credit ratings of the two leading agencies, Moody's and Standard & Poor's (S&P). We find that the ordering of risks they imply is broadly consistent with macroeconomic fundamentals. While the agencies cite a large number of criteria in their assignment of sovereign ratings, a regression using only eight factors explains more than 90 percent of the cross-sectional variation in the ratings. In particular, a country's rating appears largely determined by its per capita income, external debt burden, inflation experience, ...
Working Paper
How consistent are credit ratings? a geographic and sectoral analysis of default risk
We examine differences in default rates by sector and obligor domicile. We find evidence that credit ratings have been imperfectly calibrated across issuer sectors in the past. Controlling for year of issue and rating, default rates appear to be higher for U.S. financial firms than for U.S. industrial firms. Sectoral differences in recovery rates do not offset the higher default rates. By contrast, we do not find significant differences in default rates between U.S. and foreign firms.
Report
Institutional affiliation and the role of venture capital: evidence from initial public offerings in Japan
The presence of venture capital in the ownership structure of U.S. firms going public has been associated with both improved long-term performance and lower underpricing at the time of the IPOs. In Japan, we find the long-run performance of venture capital-backed IPOs to be no better than that of other IPOs, with the exception of firms backed by foreign owned or independent venture capitalists. Many of the major venture capital firms in Japan are subsidiaries of securities firms that may face a conflict of interest when underwriting the venture capital-backed issue. When venture capital ...
Journal Article
Sovereign credit ratings
Sovereign ratings are gaining importance as more governments with greater default risk borrow in international bond markets. But while the ratings have proved useful to governments seeking market access, the difficulty of assessing sovereign risk has led to agency disagreements and public controversy over specific rating assignments. Recognizing this difficulty, the financial markets have shown some skepticism toward sovereign ratings when pricing issues.
Report
Multiple ratings and credit standards: differences of opinion in the credit rating industry
Rating-dependent financial regulators assume that the same letter ratings from different agencies imply the same levels of default risk. Most "third" agencies, however, assign significantly higher ratings on average than Moody's and Standard & Poor's. We show that, contrary to the claims of some rating industry professionals, sample selection bias can account for at most half of the observed average difference in ratings. We also investigate the economic rationale for using multiple rating agencies. Among the many variables considered, only size and bond-issuance history are consistently ...
Report
Split ratings and the pricing of credit risk
Despite the fact that over 50 percent of all corporate bonds have different ratings from Moody's and Standard and Poor's at issuance, most bond pricing models ignore these differences of opinion. Our work compares a number of different methods of accounting for split ratings in estimating bond pricing models. We find that pricing rules that use only the Moody's or Standard and Poor's ratings produce unbiased but highly inefficient forecasts. If models rely instead on simply the higher or lower of the two ratings (but not both), greater bias is introduced with insignificant gains in ...
Working Paper
Competitive Effects of IPOS: Evidence from Chinese Listing Suspensions
Theory suggests that initial public offerings (IPOs) can adversely impact listed firms, both directly by increasing intra-industry competition, and in-directly by completing related asset market spaces. However, the endogeneity of individual IPO activity hinders testing these channels. This paper examines listing suspensions in China in a panel specification that accounts for macroeconomic and financial conditions, isolating the firm-level IPO impact. We measure the competi-tive impact of listing suspensions through the value share of postponed firms in the IPO queue in their industry, and ...
Report
Multiple ratings and credit standards: differences of opinion in the credit rating industry
This paper tests whether the tendency of third rating agencies to assign higher ratings than Moody's and Standard & Poor's results from more lenient standards or sample selection bias. More lenient standards might result from incentives to satisfy issuers who are, in fact, the purchasers of the ratings. Selection bias might be important because issuers that expect a low rating from a third agency are unlikely to request one. Our analysis of a broad sample of corporate bond ratings at year-end 1993 reveals that, although sample selection bias appears important, it explains less than half the ...
Journal Article
China's IPO activity and equity market volatility
China has recently considered reforming its regulation of initial public offerings in equity markets. Current policy allows more IPOs in rising markets but restricts new issues in falling markets, possibly to avoid pushing down values of existing stocks. However, recent research finds China?s IPO activity has no effect on stock price changes, perhaps because of the low volume relative to the overall market. As such, cyclical restrictions on IPOs do not appear to have stabilized Chinese markets, so policy reforms may improve market efficiency without increasing volatility.
Journal Article
Credit risk in Japan's corporate bond market
From the fall of 1997 to the spring of 1999, yield spreads in Japan's corporate bond market increased sharply. An analysis of this rapid rise suggests that Japanese investors in corporate bonds may be paying closer attention to the credit risk of individual issuers. Such a shift in investor focus would represent a major change in the structure of this market.