碳减排约束下中国工业企业信用评级

在碳达峰、碳中和目标愿景下,工业企业碳减排约束逐步趋强,有必要将碳要素相关风险纳入信用评级,合理区分不同企业信用风险水平。本文基于金融稳定视角提出一套碳减排约束下工业企业信用评级方法,即在评估企业碳减排绩效的同时,兼顾企业资金偿付能力,实现生态和经济效益平衡。研究表明:一是评级过程不仅关注企业自身信用风险水平的纵向比较,同时考虑企业间、企业与银行系统间信用风险传染效应以防控系统性金融风险;二是基于系统重要性工业企业的信用等级将全体工业企业划分至四类等级区间,进而将九分类等级划分问题转化为二分类问题,规避等级划分的“组合爆炸”困扰;三是基于“小范围遍历+序列前向选择算法”搜索不同等级间最优临界样本,既避免评级虚高给商业银行带来信贷损失,也不会因评级过低阻碍企业绿色低碳转型。 本文可为商业银行有效预警低碳转型风险、制定绿色信贷决策提供一定参考。     

The effect of corporate governance on firm’s credit ratings: further evidence using governance score in the United States

We investigate whether corporate governance affects firms’ credit ratings and whether improvement in corporate governance standards is associated with improvement in investment grade rating. We use the Gov‐score of Brown and Caylor (2006) , the Gomper’s G index and an entrenchment score of Bebchuk et al. (2009) to proxy for corporate governance. Using a sample of US firms, we find that firms characterized by stronger corporate governance have a significantly higher credit rating, and that this association is accentuated for smaller firms relative to larger firms. We find that an improvement in corporate governance is associated with improvement in bond rating.     

The (un)informative value of credit rating announcements in small markets

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 carry out unsolicited rating. We analyze the bond and equity markets response to various rating announcements at different time periods. We find that except for downgrades in 2008–2009 the rating announcements have no information value. It seems that generally the market internalizes most of the information prior to the rating announcements.     

Credit ratings and social capital

We posit that credit ratings are higher for firms headquartered in high social capital regions, where managers are more likely to be trustworthy. To test this hypothesis, 9460 corporate debt ratings of US firms from 2001– 2015 was examined. We find that firms headquartered in a county with high social capital in the US have a higher credit rating. This effect is incremental and economically comparable to that of corporate social responsibility. Additional tests suggest that the impact of social capital on ratings is likely because analysts find them more credible. We conclude that credit analysts may consider the social norm around the firm's headquarters when rating firms.     

Tax credit rating and corporate innovation decisions

The tax credit rating mechanism was formally implemented in 2014. As an important tax collection and management innovation, it has attracted the attention of regulatory authorities and scholars. Different from the literature that directly examines corporate tax compliance, we focus on the impact of tax credit rating implementation on corporate research and development (R&D) investment decisions. Using listed companies’ data from 2014 to 2019, we find that companies with higher tax credit ratings invest more in innovation, because the system helps managers identify R&D opportunities, alleviates corporate financing constraints and reduces agency costs. We confirm that tax credit ratings have manifold impacts on corporate information environments and business decisions, with better ratings positively affecting firms’ business decisions. This discovery can inform tax policy reform, encourage corporate innovation and construct social credit systems.     

信用评级变动能反映企业真实财务信息吗?——基于财务重述的视角

本文以2007-2018年拥有主体信用评级的A股上市公司为研究对象,利用企业财务错报在未来被重述这一场景,检验主体信用评级变动能否反映企业真实财务信息。研究发现,评级机构在发债企业财务错报年显著下调了主体信用评级,而在重述公告发布年没有上述现象,这表明主体信用评级下调反映了企业的真实财务信息。在控制内生性影响后,结论仍然成立。进一步研究发现,发债企业当期财务错报涉及盈余时,主体信用评级被下调的幅度更大,说明评级机构更加关注与盈余相关的财务信息。机制分析表明,评级机构维护自身声誉是主体信用评级变动能够反映企业真实财务信息的主要机制。此外,主体信用评级被下调还导致了资本市场投资者的负面反应。本文的研究结果为主体信用评级变动反映企业真实财务信息提供了直接的证据支持,揭示了主体信用评级的信息含量,也对理解中国情境下评级机构调整主体信用评级的行为动机提供参考。     

Do bond credit ratings lead to excess comovement?

We investigate whether non-fundamental comovement results from investors using credit ratings to group assets into different “styles”. We find that bonds that join a new rating class start comoving more with the bonds in this class, even when fundamental factors suggest otherwise. We show that this comovement effect varies according to the nature of the bond considered, and the modalities of the rating action. Downgrades have a larger impact than upgrades, and rating reviews matter as much as actual movements. Finally, rating changes between grades BBB and BB, which lead bonds to be reclassified as either “high-yield” or “investment grade” assets, seem to be of particular importance.     

ESG in credit ratings and the impact on financial markets

This study examines environment, social, governance (ESG) consideration in rating reports published by credit rating agencies. 3,719 Moody's credit rating reports between 2004 and 2015 are examined and the ESG consideration is analyzed using a latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) approach. We further analyze the stock returns and credit default swap (CDS) spread changes to check whether ESG consideration has an effect on the capital market reactions. We find a small but present consideration of ESG in rating decisions. Within ESG, corporate governance plays the most important role. Moreover, the results reveal that ESG consideration is a significant determinant in the stock return and CDS spread around the rating announcement. We find that all ESG criteria are important for equity and debt investors.     

Divergence in credit ratings

During the recent credit crisis credit rating agencies (CRAs) became increasingly lax in their rating of structured products, yet increasingly stringent in their rating of corporate bonds. We examine a model in which a CRA operates in both the market for structured products and for corporate debt, and shares a common reputation across the two markets. We find that, as a CRA’s reputation becomes good enough, it can be optimal for it to inflate its ratings with probability one in the structured products market, but inflate its ratings with probability zero in the corporate bond market.     

Ratings Quality and Borrowing Choice

Past studies document that incentive conflicts may lead issuer‐paid credit rating agencies to provide optimistically biased ratings. In this paper, we present evidence that investors question the quality of issuer‐paid ratings and raise corporate bond yields where the issuer‐paid rating is more positive than benchmark investor‐paid ratings. We also find that some firms with favorable issuer‐paid ratings substitute public bonds with borrowings from informed intermediaries to mitigate the “lemons discount” associated with poor quality ratings. Overall, our results suggest that the quality of issuer‐paid ratings has significant effects on borrowing costs and the choice of debt.     

Hedging Corporate Bonds

We examine Treasury bond and stock index futures, the swap curve and two types of hypothetical corporate bond assets as alternative hedging instruments for portfolios of corporate bonds. Conducting ex post and ex ante tests we find evidence that credit quality and maturity are important sources of basis risk when hedging corporate bonds whose credit rating are below triple A. We conclude that a new corporate hedging instrument may be useful for those wishing to hedge corporate bond portfolios provided that transaction costs are not too high relative to existing futures contracts.     

Internal ratings systems,implied credit risk and the consistency of banks’ risk classification policies

This paper aims at improving our understanding of internal risk rating systems (IRS) at large banks, of the way in which they are implemented, and at verifying if IRS produce consistent estimates of banks’ loan portfolio credit risk. An important property of our work is that the size of our data set allows us to derive measures of credit risk without making any assumptions about correlations between loans, by applying Carey’s [Carey, Mark, 1998. Credit risk in private debt portfolios. Journal of Finance LIII (4), 1363–1387] non-parametric Monte Carlo re-sampling method.We find substantial differences between the implied loss distributions of two banks with equal “regulatory” risk profiles; both expected losses and the credit loss rates at a wide range of loss distribution percentiles vary considerably. Such variation will translate into different levels of required economic capital. Our results also confirm the quantitative importance of size for portfolio credit risk: for common parameter values, we find that tail risk can be reduced by up to 40% by doubling portfolio size.Our analysis makes clear that not only the formal design of a rating system, but also the way in which it is implemented (e.g. a rating grade composition; the degree of homogeneity within rating classes) can be quantitatively important for the shape of credit loss distributions and thus for banks’ required capital structure. The evidence of differences between lenders also hints at the presence of differentiated market equilibria, that are more complex than might otherwise be supposed: different lending or risk management “styles” may emerge and banks strike their own balance between risk-taking and (the cost of) monitoring (that risk).     

Financial Distress in the Great Depression

We use firm‐level data to study corporate performance during the Great Depression era for all industrial firms on the NYSE. Our goal is to identify the factors that contribute to business insolvency and valuation changes during the period 1928‐1938. We find that firms with more debt and lower bond ratings in 1928 became financially distressed more frequently during the Depression, consistent with the trade‐off theory of leverage and the information production role of credit rating agencies. We also document for the first time that firms responded to tax incentives to use debt during the Depression era but that the extra debt used in response to this tax‐driven “debt bias” did not contribute significantly to the occurrence of distress. Finally, we conduct an out‐of‐sample test during the recent 2008‐2009 Recession and find that higher leverage and lower bond ratings also increased the occurrence of financial distress during this period.     

The impact of multi-dimensional corporate transparency on us firms’ credit ratings and cost of capital

This study examines corporate transparency in the US market for a sample of 319 S&P 500 firms. We examine whether a number of disparate measures of corporate transparency used by other researchers are distinct, cohere as measures of a single factor of corporate transparency, or capture multiple different dimensions. Next, we begin to examine the impact of corporate transparency, conceived in the broadest sense, and not limited to financial reporting, on US firms. We develop a model of corporate transparency based on a broad definition and framework proposed by Bushman, Piotrowski and Smith, which we extend in several ways, and then study the effect of corporate transparency on cost of debt, credit rating, and cost of equity. First, we find that corporate transparency is neither a unitary concept nor merely an ambiguous term for multiple distinct concepts: factor analysis of ten corporate transparency variables identifies four independent underlying dimensions: public disclosure information, intermediary information, earnings quality information and insider information. Second, we find that corporate transparency has significant power to explain cross-sectional variation in credit rating and cost of capital. More specifically, (i) credit rating, cost of debt, and beta are significantly associated with disclosure information transparency; (ii) credit rating, cost of equity, and beta are significantly associated with intermediary information transparency; and (iii) cost of equity and beta are significantly associated with insider information transparency. Our findings offer a more comprehensive evaluation of corporate transparency than prior studies, and we demonstrate direct economic implications for both US firms and markets.     

Is less information better information? Evidence from the credit rating withdrawal

This paper examines the stock market reaction to two different types of credit rating withdrawals by Moody’s. The first type of withdrawal occurs when a firm stops being rated. This happens, for example, when firms choose to no longer pay for a rating. We find that the stock market reaction depends on the information which remains available. The second type of withdrawal is due to Moody’s policy of removing the issuer rating and keeping the corporate family rating for the same firm. The corporate family rating is usually more favorable than the issuer rating. The paper shows that the removal of the issuer rating leads to positive stock market reaction. We conclude that lower disclosure of rating information is not necessarily associated with higher cost of equity. Instead, our findings emphasize the incentive for firms to engage in ratings shopping by publishing only the most favourable ratings.     

The impact of corporate fraud on director‐interlocked firms: Evidence from bank loans

We examine the impact of corporate fraud committed by one firm (the “fraudulent firm”) on other firms with interlocking directors (the “interlocked firms”), focusing on the debtholder side. We argue that the revelation of a fraudulent firm's fraud can damage the reputation of the interlocked firms because corporate governance can propagate via director interlocks. Empirically, we find that the interlocked firms' cost of debt is higher and the loan covenants become stricter after the fraud cases of the fraudulent firms are revealed. Consistent with the corporate governance propagation explanation, our results are weaker (stronger) for interlocked firms that have better (worse) pre‐event corporate governance standards. Our findings suggest that corporate fraud of fraudulent firms can affect other firms through director‐interlocks beyond shareholder value.     

CEO political preference and credit ratings

This study investigates whether a CEO's personal political ideology, as captured by his or her political contributions, is associated with a firm's credit ratings. Republican CEOs, we find, are associated with higher credit ratings, especially when their firms are headquartered in conservative areas. In addition, the link between political ideology and credit rating is more pronounced in firms that exhibit high financial distress or weak corporate governance. Changes in political ideology are associated with changes in credit rating. Our results support the behavior consistency, upper echelon, and social identity theories, as well as the risk acceptance hypothesis, and are robust to a number of alternative specifications as well as when alternate approaches and measures of credit risk are introduced. Using Republican CEOs as a proxy for conservative CEOs, our evidence implies that credit rating agencies justifiably view a CEO's political ideology and conservatism as indicative of corporate policies and, therefore, as an important determinant of the firm's credit ratings.     

Credit derivatives and bank credit supply

Credit derivatives are the latest in a series of innovations that have had a significant impact on credit markets. Using a micro data set of individual corporate loans, this paper explores whether use of credit derivatives is associated with an increase in bank credit supply. We find only limited evidence that greater use of credit derivatives is associated with greater supply of bank credit. The strongest effect is for large term loans—newly negotiated loan extensions to large corporate borrowers, with a largely negative impact on (previously negotiated) commitment lending. Even for large term borrowers, increases in the volume of credit are offset by higher spreads. These findings suggest that the benefits of the growth of credit derivatives may be narrow, accruing mainly to large firms that are likely to be “named credits” in these transactions. Finally, use of credit derivatives appears to be complementary to other forms of hedging by banks, though the banks most active in hedging appear to charge more for additional amounts of credit.     

债券市场的评级信息能改善股票市场信息环境吗?——来自分析师预测的证据

本文研究发现,信用评级增加了分析师预测的公共信息,同时没有减少分析师预测的私有信息,即信用评级信息能够改善股票市场信息环境。具体地,本文利用2006-2016年上市公司数据实证发现,信用评级能显著提高分析师预测精度、降低分析师预测分歧度与乐观偏差,且这种效应在信息不对称程度高、低能力分析师跟踪的企业以及外资参股的评级机构中更加显著,这说明信用评级向分析师提供了新的信息。进一步地,信用评级只增加了分析师预测的公共信息,对私有信息没有显著影响,同时也不影响分析师的调研行为,上述结论表明信用评级信息披露并不影响分析师拥有私有信息的优势,且信用评级机构与分析师之间存在互补而非替代关系。因此,金融监管应该加强对评级机构尽职调研的要求,充分发挥信用评级机构的信息中介功能。     

The Real Effects of Credit Ratings: The Sovereign Ceiling Channel

We show that sovereign debt impairments can have a significant effect on financial markets and real economies through a credit ratings channel. Specifically, we find that firms reduce their investment and reliance on credit markets due to a rising cost of debt capital following a sovereign rating downgrade. We identify these effects by exploiting exogenous variation in corporate ratings due to rating agencies' sovereign ceiling policies, which require that firms' ratings remain at or below the sovereign rating of their country of domicile.