An Analysis of Bank Financial Strength Ratings and Credit Rating Data

Property-liability Insurer Financial Strength Ratings: Differences across Rating Agencies

Regulators, investors, consumers, and insurance brokers use insurer financial strength ratings to evaluate the insolvency risk of insurers. This article investigates the factors influencing the decision to obtain a rating or multiple ratings, the determinants of ratings for the three major insurer rating agencies, and reasons for differences in ratings across agencies. This study indicates that...

Asymmetric benchmarking in bank credit rating

This study proposes an information asymmetry hypothesis to examine why bank credit ratings vary among countries even when bank financial ratios remain constant. Countries are divided among those with low and high information asymmetry. The former include high-income countries, those in North America and West Europe regions, and those with strong institutional environment quality, whereas the la...

Capital Ratios and Credit Ratings as Predictors of Bank Failures

We examine the power of various capital ratios — scaled by total assets, riskweighted assets and gross revenues — to forecast U.S. bank failures. Capital ratios are the centerpiece of the 1988 Basel Accord, and various ratios are currently under consideration in Basel in connection with one of the three “pillars” of a more comprehensive approach to capital adequacy. Using data for the period 19...

Expositing stages of VPRS analysis in an expert system: Application with bank credit ratings

The variable precision rough sets model (VPRS) along with many derivatives of rough set theory (RST) necessitates a number of stages towards the final classification of objects. These include, (i) the identification of subsets of condition attributes (b-reducts in VPRS) which have the same quality of classification as the whole set, (ii) the construction of sets of decision rules associated wit...

Trade Credit versus Bank Credit during Financial Crises