Rating Agencies

Nel secondo dopoguerra, l'egemonia economica e monetaria degli Stati Uniti, conclamata con gli accordi di Bretton Woods, è stata messa in discussione prima dalla Comunità Economica Europea, poi dal Giappone e infine dalla Cina.  Dopo la crisi del 1971 al sistema di Bretton Woods è succeduto il dollar standard, un "non sistema" che ha visto un intervento crescente da parte dei paesi emergenti e, in particolare della Cina. L'inclusione del renmimbi nel basket dei Diritti Speciali di Prelievo può avvicinare il passaggio del sistema monetario internazionale da un approccio egemone a uno multivalutario.  Il volume contiene saggi di Cosimo Magazzino, Olga Marzovilla, Marco Mele e Gian Cesare Romagnoli.

In the second afterwar period, the economic and monetary egemony of the United States, at the base of the Bretton Woods Agreement, has been challenged first by the European Economic Community, then by Japan and eventually by China. After 1971, the Bretton Woods System has been replaced from the "dollar standard" a "non system" which has seen a growing intervention by the emergent countries, China in particular. The inclusion of renmimbi into the currencies basket of the Special Drawing Rights may draw near a change of the inetrnational monetary system from an egemonic approach to a multicurrency one. This volume collects the research work done by Cosimo Magazzino, Olga Marzovilla, Marco Mele and Gian Cesare Romagnoli.

This paper explores the financialization of philanthropy. Motivated by a recent surge of interest in social impact investing, microcredits and nonprofit rating agencies, I compare structural characteristics of the financial sphere and an evolving 'social investment' paradigm of the philanthropic sector and find a broad range of structural parallels. I argue that financialization, thus understood, is part of a broader project of marketization which aims at reshaping philanthropy along the lines and logics of financial capitalism and I discuss the consequences of these developments.
A revised version of this paper is forthcoming in the Routledge Companion to Philanthropy.

Compared to the various forms of intergovernmental or public-private co-operation, transnational private self-regulation is a rather rarely studied case of global economic governance. Furthermore, existing research on transnational self-regulation has neglected the issue of
corporate governance, which is central to the way capitalism is organised today. Transnational private self-regulation, however, appears to be a crucial part of any explanation of current
changes of national models of corporate governance and, therefore, of the basic organisation of economic life. Three features of private self-regulation are singled out for a more detailed
study, namely credit rating, private codes of “good corporate governance” and the transnational harmonisation of accounting standards. In all of these cases, co-ordination service firms
such as rating agencies, institutional investors and accounting companies play an important role as mechanisms for the transnational harmonisation of corporate governance. The paperconcludes that the increasing role of transnational private self-regulation raises important normative concerns and, in more particular, asks for the identification of alternative agency.

We use EU sovereign bond yield and CDS spreads daily data to carry out an event study analysis on the reaction of government yield spreads before and after announcements from rating agencies (Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s, Fitch). Our results show: significant responses of government bond yield spreads to changes in rating notations and outlook, particularly in the case of negative announcements; announcements are not anticipated; bi-direction causality between ratings and spreads; spillover effects especially from lower rated countries to higher rated countries; and amplification effects for recently downgraded countries. JEL: C23; E44; G15.