Staff Reports
Rating Banks: Risk and Uncertainty in an Opaque Industry
May 2000 Number 105
JEL classification: G20, G21, G28

Author: Donald P. Morgan

The pattern of disagreement between bond raters suggests that bank and insurance firms are inherently more opaque than other firms. Moody's and Standard and Poor's split more frequently over these financial intermediaries, and the splits are more lopsided, as theory here predicts. Uncertainty over the banks stems from their assets, loans and trading assets in particular, the risks of which are hard to observe or easy to change. Banks' high leverage, which invites agency problems, compounds the uncertainty over their assets. Our findings bear on both the existence and reform of bank regulation.

Available only in PDFPDF37 pages / 128 kb

For a published version of this report, see Donald Morgan, "Rating Banks: Risk and Uncertainty in an Opaque Industry," American Economic Review 92, no. 4 (September 2002): 874-88.

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