Knowledge that Transforms

While the production of credit ratings has long been limited mainly to rating agencies (CRAs), recent years have seen the growing popularity of consensus credit ratings crowdsourced from banks (i.e., bank ratings). We provide the first comprehensive examination of the properties and informativeness of bank ratings relative to CRA ratings. We find that bank ratings often deviate from CRA ratings, with over 60% of firm-months having different bank and CRA ratings. These deviations contain useful information. Bank ratings improve out-of-sample prediction of defaults and CRA rating revisions and explain the cross-section of credit spreads. However, bank ratings do not improve out-of-sample prediction of credit excess returns, indicating that current prices incorporate bank rating information. Overall our findings suggest that bank ratings are a useful supplement to traditional credit ratings.

We develop a method for extracting “other information” from the articulation between bottom-line accounting numbers and stock prices. We posit that “other information” captures future earnings growth originating from conservative accounting recognition principles as demonstrated by Penman and Zhang (2020) and Penman and Zhu (2022), as well as nonzero net present value investment opportunities. Our findings confirm that “other information” is strongly associated with various proxies for expected future earnings growth and firm risk attributes. Furthermore, we show how a structural expected return model incorporating our “other information” estimate can predict out-of-sample future stock returns and generate sizeable long-short return spreads.