Advanced Search
MyIDEAS: Login

Credit Ratings Failures and Policy Options

Contents:

Author Info

Abstract

This paper examines the role of credit rating agencies in the subprime crisis, which was at the outset of the 2007-08 financial turmoil. The focus of the paper is on two aspects of ratings that contributed to the boom and bust of the market for asset-backed securities: rating inflation and coarse information disclosure. The paper discusses how regulation can be designed to mitigate these problems in the future. The suggestion is that regulators should require rating agencies to be paid by investors rather than by issuers (or at least constrain the way they are paid by issuers) and force greater disclosure of information about the underlying pool of securities.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://www.csef.it/WP/wp239.pdf
Download Restriction: no

Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy in its series CSEF Working Papers with number 239.

as in new window
Length:
Date of creation: 06 Nov 2009
Date of revision:
Publication status: published in Economic Policy, 401-431, April 2010
Handle: RePEc:sef:csefwp:239

Contact details of provider:
Postal: I-80126 Napoli
Phone: +39 081 - 675372
Fax: +39 081 - 675372
Email:
Web page: http://www.csef.it/
More information through EDIRC

Related research

Keywords: credit rating agencies; securitization; default; liquidity; crisis; transparency;

Other versions of this item:

Find related papers by JEL classification:

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

References

References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
as in new window
  1. Patrick Bolton & Xavier Freixas & Joel Shapiro, 2012. "The Credit Ratings Game," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 67(1), pages 85-112, 02.
  2. Bo Becker & Todd Milbourn, 2008. "Reputation and competition: evidence from the credit rating industry," Harvard Business School Working Papers 09-051, Harvard Business School, revised Sep 2010.
  3. Benjamin J. Keys & Tanmoy Mukherjee & Amit Seru & Vikrant Vig, 2010. "Did Securitization Lead to Lax Screening? Evidence from Subprime Loans," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 125(1), pages 307-362, February.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

Citations

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
as in new window

Cited by:
  1. Aggelos KOTIOS & George GALANOS & Spyros ROUKANAS, 2012. "The Rating Agencies In The International Political Economy," Scientific Bulletin - Economic Sciences, University of Pitesti, vol. 11(1), pages 3-15.
  2. Baghai, Ramin & Servaes, Henri & Tamayo, Ane, 2011. "Have Rating Agencies Become More Conservative? Implications for Capital Structure and Debt Pricing," CEPR Discussion Papers 8446, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
  3. Eberl, Jakob & Jus, Darko, 2012. "The year of the cat: Taxing nuclear risk with the help of capital markets," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 51(C), pages 364-373.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sef:csefwp:239

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Lia Ambrosio).

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.