Credit Ratings Accuracy and Analyst Incentives

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					          Credit Ratings Accuracy and Analyst Incentives
                              Heski Bar-Isaac and Joel Shapiro

                                          January, 2011


          The …nancial crisis has brought a new focus on the accuracy of credit rating agencies
      (CRAs). In this paper, we highlight the incentives of analysts at the CRAs to provide
      accurate ratings. We construct a model in which analysts initially work at a CRA
      and can then either remain or move to a bank. The CRA uses incentive contracts to
      motivate analysts, but does not capture the bene…ts if the analyst moves. We …nd that
      rating agency accuracy increases with CRA monitoring, bank pro…tability (a positive
      "revolving door" e¤ect), and can be non-monotonic in the probability of an analyst

   The recent …nancial crisis has prompted an investigation into the business of credit
rating agencies (CRAs). With the rise of structured …nance products, the agencies rapidly
expanded their ratings business. This expansion seems to have come at the expense of
ratings accuracy, as the CRAs increasingly gave top ratings to structured …nance products
shortly before they collapsed (Adam Ashcraft, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, and James Vick-
ery, 2010). The academic literature has focused, unsurprisingly, on the reasons that ratings
quality su¤ered, pointing to the lack of sophistication of investors (e.g. Vasiliki Skreta and
Laura Veldkamp, 2009), the con‡icts of interests that CRAs face (Patrick Bolton, Xavier
Freixas and Joel Shapiro, 2010), and regulatory arbitrage (Lawrence J. White, 2010). In
this paper, we focus on a di¤erent channel for ‡uctuations in CRA accuracy: the labor
market for ratings analysts and their incentives to provide accurate ratings.
   Bar-Isaac: Economics Department, Stern School of Business, NYU, Suite 7-73, 44 West 4th Street,
New York, NY 10012, Shapiro: Said Business School, Oxford University, Park End Street,
Oxford OX1 1HP UK, Acknowledgements: We thank Vicente Cuñat, Marco
Pagano and Larry White for comments and productive discussions.

      In the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearings in April 2010, a
wealth of email correspondence from the top three rating agencies was made public. Among
these emails was the following, dated 10/31/2006, from a Standard & Poor´s employee:

        While I realize that our revenues and client service numbers don’ indicate any
        ill [e]¤ects from our severe understa¢ ng situation, I am more concerned than
        ever that we are on a downward spiral of morale, analytical leadership, quality
        and client service.

      This email was not alone in bemoaning personnel issues. Indeed, there is a whole section
of the Subcommittee report entitled “Chronic Resource Shortages.”Moody’ reported labor
costs as the largest and fastest-growing operating expense.1 White (2010) documents that
              s,                  s,
in 2009, Moody’ Standard and Poor’ and Fitch each had slightly more than 1,000
analysts to rate about 400,000, 1,400,000, and 700,000 bond issues, respectively. As Louise
Story (2010) reports, analysts ‡ the ratings agencies for investment banking jobs.

        At the height of the mortgage boom, companies like Goldman o¤ered million-
        the agencies.

      This “revolving door”between CRAs and investment banks has been a policy concern;
the Dodd-Frank …nancial reform bill (2010) addresses the con‡icts of interests of analysts
working on deals with an issuer just before being hired by that issuer and puts in place
disclosure requirements.
      The CRAs lacked adequate sta¤, motivation, and quality personnel just at the time
when their business was booming the most. Why did they not increase salaries and expand
hiring? We argue that the answer lies in their incentives: When business is booming the
most, CRAs have the smallest pay-o¤ from being accurate.
      In this paper, we examine the analyst labor market and analyst incentives through
the lens of market fundamentals. We construct a simple model in which analysts live for
two periods and initially work at a rating agency, learning the ratings business. They
can then move on to a bank or remain at the rating agency. The CRA can use incentive
    According to Moody’ Annual Report 2007, p.42, “Compensation and bene…ts continue to be Moody’s
largest expense, accounting for approximately $103 million in growth from prior year.”

contracts to motivate novice analysts to train harder, but does not capture the fruits of
the training if the analyst moves on. We take for granted that CRAs cannot compete
with investment banks on salary. This may be because CRAs cannot write su¢ ciently
high-powered incentive contracts and/or because CRAs’ marginal returns from labor are
    We demonstrate that rating agency accuracy increases with the CRA’ ability to moni-
tor analysts. Ratings accuracy also increases with investment bank pro…tability, as analysts
seek more training in order to reap a higher payo¤ if they move to an investment bank
(a bene…t from the “revolving door” e¤ect). Perhaps most subtle, we show that accuracy
is non-monotonic in the probability of an analyst getting a job at an investment bank.
For high probabilities, the CRA’ investment in the analyst is unlikely to pay o¤, and
many well-trained analysts leave. For low probabilities, the dominant e¤ect is that of the
increased probability of getting a job at an investment bank, providing the analysts with
greater incentives to work harder.
    In related work (Bar-Isaac and Shapiro, 2010) that treats labor-market incentives as
a black box but endogenizes reputation e¤ects, we argue that CRA accuracy is likely to
be countercyclical. The results in this paper— focusing on analyst incentives— are broadly
supportive of that conclusion. Other related papers include Jérôme Mathis, James McAn-
drews, and Jean-Charles Rochet (2009) and Roland Strausz (2005). They examine how
a CRA’ concern for its reputation a¤ects its ratings quality in an in…nite-period model.
However they do not discuss the labor market or economic ‡uctuations over the business
cycle. Yeon-Koo Che (1995) examines the revolving door between regulators and the …rms
they regulate, …nding that this relationship may be socially bene…cial.

1    A Simple Model
We consider incentive contracts between a monopoly CRA and analysts. An analyst works
for two periods. In the …rst period of her employment, she is a novice (n) and works at a
CRA, and in the second period, she is seasoned (s) and may work at either a CRA or an
investment bank. Analysts are initially identical and their outside options are normalized
to 0. If the analyst is working for the CRA in period i of her life (i = n; s) at date t, she
can exert e¤ort et to improve her ability. The ability of a seasoned analyst at date t is
additive in the e¤orts of both periods of her career: et
                                                              1   + et . E¤ort is unobservable and
is costly to the analyst; it has a quadratic cost   2
                                                         . We suppose that the CRA has a noisy

technology to monitor e¤ort. The CRA observes a signal H with probability l + (1                        l)et ,
where the …rst term (l) represents luck and the other ((1                 l)et ) increases in e¤ort. The
CRA observes a signal L with the complementary probability. The parameter l captures
the CRA’ monitoring ability or the noisiness of the signal. As l approaches 1, the signal
approaches complete noise. The CRA wants to incentivize e¤ort, as it improves current
accuracy and, possibly, future accuracy (if it can retain the seasoned analyst), and will,
thus, write an incentive contract. If the signal L is observed, the CRA pays the analyst’s
outside option of 0, and if the signal H is observed, it pays wi .
       In addition to raising her current expected wage, exerting e¤ort in the …rst period means
that the analyst learns more about the ratings business, which improves her prospects of
gaining a more lucrative second-period job at an investment bank. We summarize these
expected opportunities from the banking sector by a probability of getting a bank job
and the returns to getting a bank job bet .2;3 We suppose that
                                        n                                       does not depend on et ,
which may be consistent with investment banks not directly observing et and the CRA
having di¢ culty competing with lucrative investment-bank o¤ers.4 If an analyst receives
an investment-bank o¤er, the CRA does not …nd it worthwhile to compete for the worker.
Our interest is in comparative statics with respect to            and b as di¤erent ways of capturing
changing economic conditions.
       This is a simple model of overlapping generations; the CRA employs both novice and
seasoned analysts at the same time, and we consider the equilibrium in a steady state.
We normalize the mass of novice analysts hired to 1. The average ability of novice and
seasoned analysts in the CRA is denoted by z. The average ability of CRA analysts a¤ects
the CRA’ ratings accuracy. In particular, in each period, the CRA has an investment
to rate. Investments can be good with probability                  or bad with probability 1            . A
good investment never defaults, whereas a bad investment defaults with probability p. If
the investment is good, the CRA can perfectly identify it as good. If the investment is
bad, the CRA identi…es it as bad with probability z 2 (0; 1). The CRA values both good
ratings (as these generate fees) and ratings accuracy (as this helps the CRA to maintain
     Opportunities for analysts in the banking sector range from analyzing assets to determine investment
opportunities to structuring products ahead of public o¤erings.
     Che (1995) has a similar formulation but considers …rst-period e¤ort as the probability that the worker
gets an outside job. We could also interpret our results in this manner.
     Taking the analyst’ expected utility in an investment-bank position to be linear in et is convenient and
                        s                                                                 n
can be micro-founded if, for example, the analyst’ skills developed at the CRA improve her performance
at an investment bank that o¤ers an incentive contract.

its reputation and generate fees in the future). A CRA assigns a value 0 to the analyst
rating the investment as bad,                to the analyst rating the investment as good, and                                 R to
the investment getting a good rating and subsequently defaulting (being                                        inaccurate).5   The
variable R represents the reputation cost. The CRA and the analysts are both risk-neutral
and have discount factor . We suppose that Rp                                       > 0, as otherwise there would be no
reputational incentive to maintain accurate ratings.

1.1      Analysis
Solving the maximization problem for a novice and for a seasoned analyst, we obtain that
their e¤ort choices at time t are:

                                             et = wn (1
                                              n                          l) +        b                                          (1)
                                                 et = ws (1
                                                  s                      l).                                                    (2)

       Given these choices, the average ability at the CRA— which employs (1                                          ) seasoned
analysts of ability   et 1
                       n     +   et ,
                                  s     for each novice analyst of ability                     et —
                                                                                                n      is given by

                                                       n        1
                                         zt =              +             (et
                                                                                    + et ).
                                                                                       s                                        (3)
                                                  2             2

                                  s                              t      t
Finally, we can write down the CRA’ problem, which is to choose wn and ws in each period
                                                                           t      t
t in order to maximize its discounted sum of expected pro…ts. Notice that wn and ws a¤ect
the pro…ts only in period t and in period t + 1, and so the period-by-period maximization
problem is

                                        max           +(            Rp)(1            )(1      zt )                              (4)
                                         t   t
                                        wn ;ws
                             + (           +(              Rp)(1          )(1        zt+1 ))
                                 wn (l + (1            l)et )
                                                          n         (1           t
                                                                               )ws (l + (1           l)et ),

where the …rst line is the period t gains from a good report ( ( + (1                                           )(1   zt )) minus
the reputation cost of being inaccurate ( Rp(1                                 )(1       zt )); the second line is the same
    The CRA is not paid for bad ratings here. This is a version of the shopping e¤ect described in Bolton,
Freixas, and Shapiro (2010) and Skreta and Veldkamp (2009). Mathis, McAndrews, and Rochet (2009)
assume that no issue takes place if the rating is bad and that the CRA is not paid in this case, which is
equivalent to our approach.

for period t + 1; and the third line captures wage costs in period t for novice and seasoned
workers. After substituting for the analysts’ e¤orts, et and et , and the average analyst
                                                       n      s
                                                 s                   t      t
ability at the CRA, zt , we can solve for the CRA’ choice of wages, wn and ws , by writing
down the …rst-order conditions of this problem with respect to these wages. We can then
impose the stationarity of the problem, which implies that wi = wi , et = ei and zt = z,
and, …nally, substitute the wages into equation (3) to obtain an expression for the accuracy
level z in terms of exogenous parameters:
                             "                                                                    #
                         1        ( Rp            )(1             )( 1+
                                                                      2         +    1
                                                                                    (2   )2
                      z=                            3 2   l
                                                                                                      .                    (5)
                         2                          2   (1 l)           +       b

   We can then consider the comparative statics of ratings accuracy z with respect to the
exogenous parameters that a¤ect the analysts’incentives.

Proposition 1 The accuracy level of the CRA (i) decreases in the level of noise l; (ii)
increases with the pro…tability parameter for investment banks b; and (iii) either always
increases with the probability of getting an investment-bank job                                  or …rst increases up to a
cuto¤    and then decreases; in particular, the latter case arises as                                     ! 1.

Proof. Claims (i) and (ii) are immediate on taking the derivative of z with respect to the
appropriate exogenous parameter.
   We can turn to the comparative statics with respect to                                  ; the derivative of z with
respect to   is proportional to

                                                                        2   2       2 +
                             b + ( Rp                 )(1           )                                                      (6)
                                                                            (2       )3
                                        1           l
                             +                2               .
                                 (2          ) (1        l)

The sign of expression (6) is equal to the sign of:

                                 b (2         )3 (1       l) + l (2             )+                                         (7)
                          ( Rp              )(1         )(1       l)(2      2        2 +           ).

When    = 0, expression (7) is equal to b8(1                      n) + ( Rp          )(1          )(1      l)(2   2 ) + 2l > 0.

The derivative of expression (7) with respect to               is

                                    b3 (2     )2 (1      l)                                                 (8)
                                    ( Rp      )(1        )(1        l)(2        )      l.

This expression is negative, so expression (7) is monotonically decreasing in .
     When       = 1, expression (7) is equal to b(1                     l)          ( Rp     )(1   )(1   l) + l.
                                             ( Rp     )(1 )         b           l
Note that at       = 1 we have w1 =                 2(1 n)                   2(1 l)2
                                                                                       , and so w1 > 0 requires
( Rp      )(1     )(1    l)   b(1    l)     l > 0. For         ! 1, therefore expression (7) evaluated
at    = 1 is negative.

     The proposition delivers several new and interesting results. First, the CRA’ accuracy
decreases when it less able to monitor its workers (or when their performance is noisier)—
that is, when l is low. This is not necessarily related to the economic cycle, but is related
to the recent crisis in the sense that the boom came with the rise of structured …nance
products. Structured …nance products are, by their nature, complex and di¢ cult to model
(see Joshua D Coval, Jakub W. Jurek, and Erik Sta¤ord, 2009).
     Second, when investment banks reap higher returns from the skill set of former CRA
analysts (captured in the model by a high value of b), novice analysts have higher incentives
to work hard. This a positive aspect of the revolving door between CRAs and investment
banks and is similar to the e¤ect discussed in Che (1995).
     Finally, and most importantly, we see that increasing the probability of getting an
investment-banking job, , increases accuracy when these opportunities are rare (the pos-
itive revolving-door e¤ect), but can decrease accuracy when there are many opportunities
to move on to investment banks. Although novices might work harder to capture returns
in the banking sector, the decrease in accuracy has two sources: the direct e¤ect that a
greater fraction of the CRA’ analysts are relatively low-ability novices; and the fact that
as the CRA loses more seasoned workers to the banks, it has less incentive to train them.
Unfortunately, this latter case seems consistent with the anecdotal evidence discussed in
the introduction. As issuance rose dramatically, investment banks needed skilled analysts
to structure deals for them. And as investment-banks jobs became more available, analysts
could spend less time in training and working for the CRA before moving on.

2    Discussion
The simple model draws attention to how changing economic conditions a¤ect analyst
incentives and, thereby, CRA quality; however, there are several important aspects that
the analysis does not address.
    First, the model above focuses on a moral-hazard problem and assumes that analysts are
identical. In practice, the pool of actual and potential analysts is likely to be heterogeneous.
Investment banks may cream-skim the most able analysts (and take a relatively larger
share of them in boom times), exacerbating our results by worsening accuracy at the
CRAs. The initial markets for novice analysts may also be plagued by a selection e¤ect—
for undergraduates and MBAs interested in …nancial analysis, CRA positions are likely
not to be the most desirable options. However, this e¤ect may be mitigated or overturned
to the extent that starting a career at a CRA is seen as a pathway to more lucrative and
otherwise hard to obtain investment-banking jobs.
    Second, the model does not consider what analysts do when employed at banks. To the
extent that they provide proprietary analysis on existing assets to banks and their clients,
this might dampen concern about the accuracy of public ratings; however, recent events
suggest that this is not the case. If analysts are directly involved in structuring new issues
that are then rated, the employment of more and better analysts at the banks may (i) create
better issues overall, (ii) help game the ratings system, or (iii) both. The second concern is
more pronounced when CRA resources are stretched thin, making them rely increasingly
on standardized valuation models in which former analysts (now at investment banks) are
    Third, Section 1 simpli…es the economic environment in which the CRA operates. In
particular, the model treats the CRA’ reputational concern as an exogenous variable
and the economic fundamentals as constant over time. In Bar-Isaac and Shapiro (2010),
we take a complementary approach by endogenizing CRA reputation, explicitly allowing
for business cycle ‡uctuations, and modeling competition between CRAs. That paper,
however, takes a more reduced-form approach to the CRA’ problem of investing in analyst
quality. Our main …nding there is that CRA accuracy is likely to be countercyclical. By
modeling the analyst incentive problem, we can gain further insight into CRA quality.
First, consider the revolving-doors e¤ect, where a higher potential payo¤ at investment
banks (more likely in a boom) gives analysts incentives to invest in e¤ort. This e¤ect
depends very much on timing; the payo¤ at investment banks is the expected payo¤ one

period ahead. So early in the boom, this may well encourage analyst e¤ort, but as the
boom reaches its peak, it may substantially discourage it. Second, consider the probability
of getting a job at an investment bank. If this likelihood is su¢ ciently high, then the larger
it gets (as in the case of going from a recession to a boom), the lower accuracy becomes.

 [1] Ashcraft, Adam B., Goldsmith-Pinkham, Paul, and James Vickery (2010), “MBS
    ratings and the mortgage credit boom,” mimeo, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

 [2] Bar-Isaac, Heski and Joel Shapiro (2010), “Ratings Quality over The Business Cycle,”
    mimeo, New York University.

 [3] Bolton, Patrick, Freixas, Xavier and Joel Shapiro. (2010), “The Credit Ratings Game,”
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 [4] Coval, Joshua D., Jurek, Jakub W., and Erik Sta¤ord (2009) “The Economics of
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 [5] Che, Yeon-Koo (1995), “Revolving Doors and the Optimal Tolerance for Agency Col-
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 [6] Mathis, Jérôme, McAndrews, James and Jean-Charles Rochet (2009) “Rating the
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    nal of Monetary Economics, 56(5), 657-674.

 [7] Moody’ Corporation (2008) Annual Report 2007.

 [8] Senate Permanent Subcomittee on Investigations (2010), “Hearing on Wall Street and
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 [9] Skreta, Vasiliki and Laura Veldkamp (2009) “Ratings Shopping and Asset Complexity:
    A Theory of Ratings In‡ation” Journal of Monetary Economics, 56(5), 678-695.

[10] Story, Louise (2010) “Prosecutors Ask if 8 Banks Duped Rating Agencies,”New York
    Times, May 12.

[11] Strausz, Roland (2005) “Honest Certi…cation and the Threat of Capture,” Interna-
    tional Journal of Industrial Organization, 23(1-2), 45-62.

[12] White, Lawrence J. 2010. “Markets: The Credit Rating Agencies,” Journal of Eco-
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