Credit rating agencies do not only disclose simple ratings but announce watchlists (rating reviews) and outlooks as well. This paper analyzes the economic function underlying the review procedure. Using Moody’s rating data between 1982 and 2004, we find that for borrowers of high creditworthiness, rating agencies employ watchlists primarily in order to improve the delivery of information. For low-quality borrowers, in contrast, the review procedure seems to have developed into an implicit contract á la Boot et al. (2006), inducing the companies “on watch” to abstain from risk-augmenting actions. The agencies’ economic role hence appears to have been enhanced from a pure information certification towards an active monitoring function.

Launched in Summer 2012, the European Central Bank’s (ECB) Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) program indirectly recapitalized European banks through its positive impact on periphery sovereign bonds. However, the stability reestablished in the banking sector did not fully translate into economic growth. We document zombie lending by banks that remained weakly capitalized even post-OMT. In turn, firms receiving loans used these funds not to undertake real economic activity, such as employment and investment, but to build cash reserves. Creditworthy firms in industries with a high zombie firm prevalence significantly suffered from this credit misallocation, which further slowed the economic recovery. Received March 21, 2018; editorial decision November 13, 2018 by Editor Philip Strahan.

We explore the causes of the credit crunch during the European sovereign debt crisis and its impact on the corporate policies of European firms. Our results show that value impairment in banks’ exposures to sovereign debt and the risk-shifting behavior of weakly capitalized banks reduced the probability of firms being granted new syndicated loans by up to 53%. This lending contraction depressed investment, employment, and sales growth of firms affiliated with affected banks. Our estimates based on firm-level data suggest that the credit crunch explains between 44% and 66% of the overall negative real effects suffered by European firms. Received April 5, 2016; editorial decision February 3, 2018 by Editor Andrew Karolyi.