This paper will explore how the financial regulatory structure propelled three credit rating
agencies—Moody's, Standard & Poor's (S&P), and Fitch—to the center of the US bond …

This paper investigates the spectacular rise and fall of structured finance. The essence of
structured finance activities is the pooling of economic assets like loans, bonds, and …

Many identify inflated credit ratings as one contributor to the recent financial-market turmoil.
We develop an equilibrium model of the market for ratings and use it to examine possible …

Rating agencies have become more conservative in assigning corporate credit ratings over
the period 1985 to 2009; holding firm characteristics constant, average ratings have dropped …

Analyzing 916 collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), we find that a top credit rating agency
frequently made positive adjustments beyond its main model that amounted to increasingly …

By December 2008, structured finance securities accounted for over $11 trillion worth of
outstanding US bond market debt (35%). 1 The lion's share of these securities was highly …

There are already many papers and books on the causes and course of the current financial
crisis, but this is the first and, for the moment, only such book to focus on the regulatory …

THE liability of lawyers, investment bankers, and accountants for misstatements and
omissions in the public disclosure documents of their corporate clients is an intensely …

Problem: Foreclosures surged during the 2007 to 2009 national foreclosure crisis and
federal policymakers failed to respond quickly and forcefully to the problem. The large …

In this paper we deal with two questions,(1) what are the origins of the current financial
crisis, and (2) what did economists contribute, or why did economists fail to provide a …