This paper develops a theoretical framework to shed light on variation in credit rating standards over time and across asset classes. Ratings issued by credit rating agencies serve a dual role: they provide information to investors and are used to regulate institutional investors. We show that...

We propose a novel conceptual approach to transparently characterizing credit market outcomes in economies with multi-dimensional borrower heterogeneity. Based on characterizations of securities' implicit demand for bank equity capital, we obtain closed-form expressions for the composition of...

Cash- and stock-financed takeover bids induce strikingly different target revaluations. We exploit detailed data on unsuccessful takeover bids between 1980 and 2008, and show that targets of cash offers are revalued on average by 15% after deal failure, whereas stock targets return to their...