We investigate the time variation in credit rating standards awarded to financial institutions of commercial bank credit ratings awarded by the three principal CRAs from 1990 to 2015 in a world-wide context by testing for well-defined structural shifts. We focus on the part of the ratings that cannot be accounted using publicly available information. We test whether major financial events are conditioning, ex-post such changes Distinctively in this paper’s timespan our analysis covers four periods: (i) before and (ii) after the 2001–2 corporate collapses, followed by (iii) before the global financial crisis and (iv) after the global financial crisis. We find substantial differences in the assignment of bank credit ratings among the three major agencies, Moody’s, Fitch, and S&P. Agencies differ both in terms of re-adjustment of ratings but also on the speed of response to the evens. All three agencies tightened ratings during the 2008 crisis and kept reducing them in its aftermath.

We compare two bootstrap methods for assessing mutual fund performance. The first produces narrow confidence intervals due to pooling over time, whereas the second produces wider confidence intervals because it preserves the cross correlation of fund returns. We then show that the average U.K. equity mutual fund manager is unable to deliver outperformance net of fees under either bootstrap. Gross of fees, 95% of fund managers on the basis of the first bootstrap and all fund managers on the basis of the second bootstrap fail to outperform the luck distribution of gross returns.