The Real Effects of Ratings Actions: Evidence from Corporate Asset Sales

The authors thank Leonce Bargeron, Igor Cunha, Dave Denis, Diane Denis, Ming Dong, Mariassunta Giannetti, Itay Goldstein, John Griffin, Li He, Jean Helwege, Chotibhak Jotikasthira, Micah Officer, Marieke van der Poel, Anjana Rajamani, Michael Roberts, René Stulz, Wolf Wagner, Mike Weisbach, Roberto Wessels, three anonymous referees, an anonymous associate editor, and Victoria Ivashina (handling editor) for their helpful comments. The authors are grateful to Elisabeth Kempf and Margarita Tsoutsoura for their invaluable help with analyses based on their partisan bias measures and to Hyunseob Kim and Howard Kung for sharing their data on asset redeployability. The authors thank Paolo Persurich and Raphael Ikonagbon from Moody’s Analytics for providing the KMV Expected Default FrequenciesTM data and Ana Lai and Henry Wurts from S&P Global for helpful discussions. The authors also benefitted from comments from seminar participants at the Rotterdam School of Management at the Erasmus University and Tel-Aviv University, the Telfer Annual Conference on Accounting and Finance at the University of Ottawa, the Economics of Credit Rating Conference at Carnegie Mellon University, the American Finance Association Meetings, the Corporate Finance Day at the University of Groningen, and the Ohio State University Finance Alumni Conference.