IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/san/cdmacp/0805.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Bonuses, Credit Rating Agencies and the Credit Crunch

Author

Listed:
  • Peter Sinclair
  • Guy Spier
  • Tom Skinner

Abstract

The payment of bonuses can bring big benefits. But harm, too, can result. In the financial sector, this is especially true, above all when they are related to noisy indicators of performance over brief periods. This paper starts by exploring these ideas, then proceeds to examine credit rating agencies and their role in the 2007 credit crunch. It emphasizes the paucity of long term high frequency financial data to quantify tail event risks, the failure to apply analysis of fundamentals in financial and housing markets, and rewards structures to individual players that reinforced myopia as three key components of the crisis.

Suggested Citation

  • Peter Sinclair & Guy Spier & Tom Skinner, 2008. "Bonuses, Credit Rating Agencies and the Credit Crunch," CDMA Conference Paper Series 0805, Centre for Dynamic Macroeconomic Analysis.
    • Handle: RePEc:san:cdmacp:0805
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/CDMA/papers/cp0805.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Canice Prendergast, 1999. "The Provision of Incentives in Firms," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 37(1), pages 7-63, March.
    2. Carmen M. Reinhart & Kenneth S. Rogoff, 2009. "Is the 2007 US Sub-Prime Financial Crisis So Different?: An International Historical Comparison," Panoeconomicus, Savez ekonomista Vojvodine, Novi Sad, Serbia, vol. 56(3), pages 291-299.
    3. George A. Akerlof, 1982. "Labor Contracts as Partial Gift Exchange," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 97(4), pages 543-569.
    4. Tobias Adrian & Hyun Song Shin, 2008. "Liquidity, monetary policy, and financial cycles," Current Issues in Economics and Finance, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, vol. 14(Jan).
    5. Mahadeva,Lavan & Sinclair,Peter (ed.), 2002. "Monetary Transmission in Diverse Economies," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521813464, October.
    6. Weitzman, Martin L, 1985. "Profit Sharing as Macroeconomic Policy," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 75(2), pages 41-45, May.
    7. Tobias Adrian & Hyun Song Shin, 2008. "Liquidity and financial cycles," BIS Working Papers 256, Bank for International Settlements.
    8. repec:bla:scandj:v:99:y:1997:i:2:p:207-35 is not listed on IDEAS
    9. Avinash Dixit & Timothy Besley, 1997. "James Mirrlees' Contributions to the Theory of Information and Incentives," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 99(2), pages 207-235, June.
    10. Shapiro, Carl & Stiglitz, Joseph E, 1984. "Equilibrium Unemployment as a Worker Discipline Device," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 74(3), pages 433-444, June.
    11. Frank Milne, 2008. "Anatomy of the Credit Crisis: The role of Faulty Risk Management Systems," C.D. Howe Institute Commentary, C.D. Howe Institute, issue 269, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Lakshmi, Geeta, 2018. "Gekko and black swans: Finance theory in UK undergraduate curricula," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 52(C), pages 35-47.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Omar Al-Ubaydli & John A. List, 2019. "How natural field experiments have enhanced our understanding of unemployment," Nature Human Behaviour, Nature, vol. 3(1), pages 33-39, January.
    2. Carr, Michael D., 2011. "Work hours and wage inequality: Evidence from the 2004 WERS," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 40(4), pages 417-427, August.
    3. Gorton, Gary & Metrick, Andrew, 2012. "Securitized banking and the run on repo," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 104(3), pages 425-451.
    4. Christiane Baumeister & Eveline Durinck & Gert Peersman, 2008. "Liquidity, Inflation and Asset Prices in a Time-Varying Framework for the Euro Area," Discussion Papers 08/06, University of Nottingham, Centre for Finance, Credit and Macroeconomics (CFCM).
    5. Juan Chaparro & Eduardo Lora, 2017. "Do Good Job Conditions Matter for Wages and Productivity? Theory and Evidence from Latin America," Applied Research in Quality of Life, Springer;International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies, vol. 12(1), pages 153-172, March.
    6. Christian Pfeifer, 2014. "Base Salaries, Bonus Payments, and Work Absence among Managers in a German Company," Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Scottish Economic Society, vol. 61(5), pages 523-536, November.
    7. Fahn, Matthias, 2019. "Reciprocity in Dynamic Employment Relationships," Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series 198, CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition.
    8. Pouliakas, Konstantinos & Theodossiou, Ioannis, 2012. "Rewarding carrots and crippling sticks: Eliciting employee preferences for the optimal incentive design," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 33(6), pages 1247-1265.
    9. Macpherson, David A. & Prasad, Kislaya & Salmon, Timothy C., 2014. "Deferred compensation vs. efficiency wages: An experimental test of effort provision and self-selection," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 102(C), pages 90-107.
    10. Pouliakas, Konstantinos & Theodossiou, Ioannis, 2009. "Rewarding Carrots & Crippling Sticks: Eliciting Employee Preferences for the Optimal Incentive Mix in Europe," MPRA Paper 14167, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    11. Ines Zapf, 2015. "Individual and Workplace-Specific Determinants of Paid and Unpaid Overtime Work in Germany," SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research 771, DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP).
    12. Alessi, Lucia & Detken, Carsten, 2011. "Quasi real time early warning indicators for costly asset price boom/bust cycles: A role for global liquidity," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 27(3), pages 520-533, September.
    13. Zapf, Ines, 2015. "Individual and workplace-specific determinants of paid and unpaid overtime work in Germany," IAB-Discussion Paper 201515, Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung (IAB), Nürnberg [Institute for Employment Research, Nuremberg, Germany].
    14. Stijn Claessens & M Ayhan Kose, 2018. "Frontiers of macrofinancial linkages," BIS Papers, Bank for International Settlements, number 95.
    15. W. Bentley MacLeod, 2007. "Reputations, Relationships, and Contract Enforcement," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 45(3), pages 595-628, September.
    16. Riccardo Leoni & Paola Gritti, 2017. "Institutional Wage Setting, Distinctive Competencies and Wage Premia," Italian Economic Journal: A Continuation of Rivista Italiana degli Economisti and Giornale degli Economisti, Springer;Società Italiana degli Economisti (Italian Economic Association), vol. 3(1), pages 71-111, March.
    17. Daniel Agness & Travis Baseler & Sylvain Chassang & Pascaline Dupas & Erik Snowberg, 2022. "Valuing the Time of the Self-Employed," CESifo Working Paper Series 9567, CESifo.
    18. Luca Riccetti & Alberto Russo & Mauro Gallegati, 2015. "An agent based decentralized matching macroeconomic model," Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination, Springer;Society for Economic Science with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents, vol. 10(2), pages 305-332, October.
    19. Goldsmith, Arthur H. & Veum, Jonathan R. & Darity, William Jr., 2000. "Working hard for the money? Efficiency wages and worker effort," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 21(4), pages 351-385, August.
    20. Daniel Goller, 2023. "Analysing a built-in advantage in asymmetric darts contests using causal machine learning," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 325(1), pages 649-679, June.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    bonuses; credit crunch; credit rating agencies.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D53 - Microeconomics - - General Equilibrium and Disequilibrium - - - Financial Markets
    • D86 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Economics of Contract Law
    • G32 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance - - - Financing Policy; Financial Risk and Risk Management; Capital and Ownership Structure; Value of Firms; Goodwill

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:san:cdmacp:0805. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: The School of Economics and Finance (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cdstauk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.