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Credit ratings have been shown to be imperfect and sometimes biased measures of risk. Has this affected their use in unregulated settings? Using textual analysis, we measure the use of credit ratings in investment mandates of fixed income mutual funds, where ratings serve to limit investment in risky assets.
We find that this use has steadily increased from high initial levels over the past two decades. Fixed income markets’ extensive and continued reliance on credit ratings either points to a lack of practically useful alternatives, a positive view of ratings by market participants, or inefficient contracting.
We show that supply side effects arising from the bond holdings of open-end mutual funds affect corporate credit risk through a refinancing channel. In our framework, bond funds exposed to flow-performance relationships become excessively...Read more
Passively managed index funds now hold over 25% of U.S. mutual fund and ETF assets. The rise of index investing raises fundamental questions about monitoring and corporate governance. We examine the voice and exit mechanisms and find that...Read more
Retirement investing in the United States has changed dramatically. The classic defined-benefit (DB) plan has largely been replaced by the defined contribution (DC) plan. With the latter, individual employees’ decisions about how much to save for...Read more
We study how the human capital embedded in teams is reallocated in corporate bankruptcies using data on US inventors. We find that bankruptcies reduce team stability. After a bankruptcy, team-dependent inventors produce fewer and less impactful...Read more