Ratings in emerging markets can serve as part of the early warning systems to reflect the weak signals of potential risks to the entity from the environment. Emerging markets have specific features that rating agencies usually consider in judgments of their credit ratings. They are underpinned...

Using a dataset of Home Equity Loan securities issued up to June 2007 and rated by Moody’s and/or S&P, this paper investigates how discretionary ratings are priced by the market. To this end, a measure of relative rating inflation (Rating Bias) observable at issuance is proposed. The way...

This work examines the information value of local Israeli credit rating announcements. This matter is also important to other small markets, in which a debt issuer may take advantage of a “rating shopping” process or choose to avoid a rating procedure altogether, because the agencies do not...

We examine the impact of unsolicited credit ratings on seasoned equity offering (SEO) underpricing in China using issuer credit rating data of listed companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges for the period 2002 to 2009. Our findings suggest that, after controlling for other...