This paper examines why unsolicited ratings tend to be lower than solicited ratings. Bothself-selection among issuers and strategic conservatism of rating agencies may be reasonableexplanations. Analyses of default incidences of non-U.S. borrowers between January 1996and December 2006 show that...

This paper examines why unsolicited ratings tend to be lower than solicited ratings. Both self-selection among issuers and strategic conservatism of rating agencies may be reasonable explanations. Analyses of default incidences of non-U.S. borrowers between January 1996 and December 2006 show...

We analyze gender differences associated with loan officer performance. Using a unique data set for a commercial bank over the period 1996 to 2006, we find that loans screened and monitored by female loan officers show a statistically and economically significant lower likelihood to turn...

We develop a shrinkage theory based framework for determining optimal port-folio weight constraints for minimum-variance portfolios in presence of parameteruncertainty. We propose to impose the set of constraints that yields the opti-mal trade-o between sampling error reduction and bias for the...

This paper investigates whether the stock market reacts to unsolicited ratings for a sample of S&P rated firms from January 1996 to December 2005. We first analyze the stock market reaction associated with the assignment of an initial unsolicited rating. We find evidence that this reaction is...

We analyze gender differences associated with loan officer performance. Using a unique data set for a commercial bank over the period 1996 to 2006, we find that loans screened and monitored by female loan officers show a statistically and economically significant lower likelihood to turn...

In this paper we investigate the implications of providing loan officers with a compensation structure that rewards loan volume and penalizes poor performance versus a fixed wage unrelated to performance. We study detailed transaction information for more than 45,000 loans issued by 240 loan...