Biased towards home, drained towards banks. Do biases in analyst views and analyst composition affect credit rating quality?

在过去的15年里，穆迪、标准普尔和惠誉等领先的信用评级机构遭到了几波批评。亚洲金融危机、21世纪初的会计丑闻、次贷危机和欧债危机都引发了公众辩论和学术研究。讨论的主要主题是，评级质量可能会受到市场结构和利益冲突的影响。因此，大多数改革建议的重点是降低准入门槛、改变激励结构和提高透明度。在这个实证研究项目中，我们希望阐明低评级质量的可能来源，这些来源迄今几乎没有受到关注：机构层面的偏见与发行人子集有关，以及分析师层面的偏见。对于前一种偏见，我们希望关注评级行为的文化和政治驱动因素，因为占主导地位的评级机构经常被指责错误地将其盎格鲁-撒克逊观点强加于国际发行人。对于后一种类型，我们将首先测试个别分析师观点中的偏见是否会转化为有偏见的评级。这种分析将比机构一级的分析包括更多的信息，例如个别分析员的文化或教育背景。我们还将研究分析师跳槽到其他雇主是否会导致人才外流，从而使分析师队伍向低素质倾斜。我们的项目得出的结果将为评级机构的客观性提供重要的见解。监管机构和评级机构都可以利用我们的发现，解决在企业和主权国家评级过程中观察到的任何不一致之处。此外，债券市场投资者将了解信用评级是否存在偏差，如果是，其严重程度如何。我们关于分析师特定影响的结果将与评级机构的内部组织及其监管相关。例如，它们将帮助评估评级机构是否应该加强评级委员会相对于首席分析师的作用，以及它们是否应该建立文化多元化的评级委员会。最后，我们的人才外流分析结果将为个别分析师的角色提供更多证据。如果存在人才流失，评级机构可以考虑改变流程，以减轻其后果(例如，加强评级委员会或给予量化模型更多权重)。在监管方面，人才外流效应可能会影响对改革的评估，这些改革通过市场结构的变化导致机构利润减少，因为这可能会使向分析师提供有吸引力的薪酬变得更加困难。

Over the last 15 years, the leading credit rating agencies such as Moody's, Standard and Poor's and Fitch have met several waves of criticism. The Asian crisis, the accounting scandals of the early 2000s, the subprime crisis and the Euro debt crisis have sparked both public debates and academic research. The dominant theme of the discussion is that rating quality can be impaired by market structure and conflicts of interest. Accordingly, most reform proposals focus on a reduction of entry barriers, a change of incentive structures, and an increase in transparency. In this empirical research project, we want to shed light on possible sources of low rating quality that have received little attention so far: biases at agency level that pertain to subsets of issuers, and biases on the analyst level. For the former type of bias we want to focus on cultural and political drivers of rating behavior, because the dominant agencies have often been accused of wrongly imposing their Anglo-Saxon perspective on international issuers. For the latter type, we will first test whether biases in the views of individual analysts translate into biased ratings. This analysis will include much more information than the one on the agency level, e.g. the cultural or educational background of individual analysts. We will also examine whether analyst transitions to other employers lead to a brain drain that biases the pool of analysts towards a low quality. Results derived from our project will give important insights regarding the objectivity of rating agencies. Both regulators and agencies could use our findings to address any inconsistency observed in the rating process of corporates and sovereigns. In addition, bond market investors would learn whether, and if yes how severely, credit ratings have been biased. Our results with respect to analyst-specific effects will be relevant for the internal organization of rating agencies and their regulation. For example, they will help to evaluate whether agencies should strengthen the role of the rating committee vis-à-vis the lead analyst, and whether they should establish culturally diverse rating committees. The outcome of our brain drain analysis, finally, will provide additional evidence on the role of individual analysts. If there is a brain drain, agencies could consider changes in processes in order to mitigate its consequences (e.g. strengthen the rating committee or give more weight to quantitative models). On the regulatory side, brain drain effects can matter for the evaluation of reforms that, through a change in market structure, lead to a reduction in agencies' profits, as this can make it more difficult to provide analysts with attractive packages.