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...

Data augmentation and Gibbs sampling are two closely related, sampling-based approaches to the calculation of posterior moments. The fact that each produces a sample whose constituents are neither independent nor identically distributed complicates the assessment of convergence and numerical...

This study examines the small sample properties of GMM and ML estimators of non-linear models of covariance structure. The study focuses on the properties of parameter estimates and the Hansen (1982) and Newey (1985) model specification test. It use Monte Carlo simulations to consider the...