• The Korean Journal of Financial Management
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.107-133
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• 2005

The object of this study is to examine the informational effect of the rating change announcement on the capital market. For this study, daily stock prices from January 1993 to February 2001 and daily bond prices from July 2000 to February 2001, for the bond market are used. In the stock market, we could not observe any statistically significant stock price reaction to rate change announcements from July 2000 to February 2001. However, if rating agencies announce more than two degradation for the period of January 1993 to February 2001, statistically negative significant stock price reactions are observed. On the other hand, there is no statistically significant stock price reaction to any other rating change announcement. In the bond market, there is no statistically test on the bond price reaction, but the general directions of bond price movements are consistent with the effect we can expect from rating change announcements. Generally, when the rating agencies degraded more than two grades at once, a cumulative abnormal returns move negatively during the overall period. In this case, we can say that rating agencies' role is to confirm information or investor's expectations. However, for the other cases, we could not observe my significant movement before or on the event data.