IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedkrw/rwp03-01.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

An examination of rating agencies' actions around the investment-grade boundary

Author

Listed:
  • Richard L. Johnson

Abstract

Data on credit ratings by the agencies with the legal status of Nationally-Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations (NRSROs) show some tendency for one-day downgrades that start from the lowest investment grade, BBB-, to travel more grades than those from neighboring grades. This would be consistent with the lower threshold of the NRSROs' grade BBB- being at a substantial default probability, but also could occur simply because downgrades to junk severely impair some firms' operations. A comparison of data from a non-NRSRO agency and an NRSRO shows that the latter's regrades from BBB- moved in the direction of the non-NRSRO's earlier ratings. This suggests the non-NRSRO defines its grade BBB- more narrowly than the NRSRO.

Suggested Citation

  • Richard L. Johnson, 2003. "An examination of rating agencies' actions around the investment-grade boundary," Research Working Paper RWP 03-01, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedkrw:rwp03-01
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.kansascityfed.org/documents/5395/pdf-RWP03-01.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Eleimon Gonis & Peter Taylor, 2009. "Changing credit rating standards in the UK: empirical evidence from 1999 to 2004," Applied Financial Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 19(3), pages 213-225.
    2. Gonzalez, F. & Haas, F. & Johannes, R. & Persson, M. & Toledo, L. & Violi, R. & Zins, C. & Wieland, M., 2004. "Market dynamics associated with credit ratings: a literature review," Financial Stability Review, Banque de France, issue 4, pages 53-76, June.
    3. Ponce, Jorge, 2012. "The quality of credit ratings: A two-sided market perspective," Economic Systems, Elsevier, vol. 36(2), pages 294-306.
    4. Joachim Jungherr & Immo Schott, 2021. "Optimal Debt Maturity and Firm Investment," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 42, pages 110-132, October.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedkrw:rwp03-01. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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 RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Zach Kastens (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbkcus.html .

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.