“…Of course, even without regulatory reliance on the ratings and even in the presence of diverse Introduction sources of information production, there is considerable potential for systemic risk when there is commonality in the underlying methods and techniques that determine the ratings. The meaning of ratings also is sensitive to the presence of feedback effects and the role of ratings as contractual triggers (e.g., Manso (2013), Kraft (2015), and Parlour and Rajan (2016)). …”