Private Ratings, Public Regulations: Credit Rating Agencies and Global Financial Governance

Cover......Page 1
Half Titile......Page 2
Frontispiece......Page 3
Series......Page 4
Title......Page 6
Copyright......Page 7
Contents......Page 8
Tables......Page 10
Figures......Page 11
Acronyms......Page 12
Series Editors’ Preface......Page 14
Preface and Acknowledgements......Page 16
1 Introduction: Private Ratings and Public Purposes......Page 18
The transformation of governance: decentralizing and privatizing political authority......Page 19
Why have states used credit ratings in regulation? The research question and its broader relevance......Page 23
Research design......Page 31
Core arguments and structure of the book......Page 34
2 The Regulatory Use of Credit Ratings: Overview and Conceptualization......Page 36
The credit rating industry: what ratings mean, how they are produced and why they are important......Page 37
The use of credit ratings in national and international regulatory systems......Page 50
Rating agencies’ standard of creditworthiness and its public enforcement......Page 77
The regulatory use of credit ratings and the delegation of political authority......Page 85
3 The Theoretical Model: An Embedded Resource Dependence View on Delegation......Page 97
Principal–agent theory revisited: causes of delegation......Page 99
A resource dependence view on delegation to specialized agents......Page 104
Bounded rationality, cost–benefit analysis and the decision for delegation......Page 121
The macro- institutional conditions for resource dependence......Page 125
Summary of the theoretical argument and hypotheses......Page 140
Intertemporal analysis: accounting for a common trend......Page 148
Interregional analysis: explaining differences across regulatory systems......Page 156
5 Making Sense of the Role of External Ratings in Basel II......Page 162
Commonalities and differences in the positions of Basel II negotiators......Page 163
Theoretical expectations and the Basel II provisions......Page 169
Findings and implications of the book......Page 172
Regulatory change after the global financial crisis: preliminary assessment and tentative outlook......Page 175
Notes......Page 183
References......Page 191
Index......Page 214