We show that the effect of regulation on credit rating informativeness depends on asset complexity. Using the Dodd-Frank Act as a shock to the rating industry, we analyze the impact of rating changes on market prices, conditioning on various measures of complexity. Rating informativeness improves after Dodd-Frank, but not for assets with high complexity. Our results are robust to alternative measures of informativeness and provide strong evidence that the impact of regulation varies in the cross-section of securities. Our findings are consistent with models combining rating shopping with rating agencies that strategically decide on information acquisition and rating inflation.

We investigate how the informativeness of rating changes varies in different economic and regulatory environments, using the financial crisis and the Dodd-Frank Act as structural changes in the context of the US corporate bond market. Our analysis focuses on testing various hypotheses based on existing models of rating agency behavior. Informativeness is measured through the impact of credit rating changes on the prices and liquidity of corporate bonds, taking differences in their characteristics into account. We find that the informativeness of rating changes is low when the economy is booming and regulation favors better-rated securities, especially when their cost of information acquisition is high. In economic downturns, the informativeness increases in combination with a high level of illiquidity. After the introduction of Dodd-Frank, rating changes became more informative, but not for securities with high information costs and low underlying credit risk.JEL-Classification: G01, G12, G24

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We study the impact of transparency on liquidity in OTC markets. We do so by providing an analysis of liquidity in a corporate bond market without trade transparency (Germany), and comparing our findings to a market with full post-trade disclosure (the U.S.). We employ a unique regulatory dataset of transactions of German financial institutions from 2008 until 2014 to find that: First, overall trading activity is much lower in the German market than in the U.S. Second, similar to the U.S., the determinants of German corporate bond liquidity are in line with search theories of OTC markets. Third, surprisingly, frequently traded German bonds have transaction costs that are 39-61 bp lower than a matched sample of bonds in the U.S. Our results support the notion that, while market liquidity is generally higher in transparent markets, a subset of bonds could be more liquid in more opaque markets because of investors "crowding" their demand into a small number of more actively traded securities.