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A Camera Obscura? Understanding How Credit Rating Agencies See City Government

Norris, Davon N
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1531830251553098

Abstract Details

2018, Master of Arts, Ohio State University, Sociology.
Ratings proliferate in social life as seemingly objective artifacts determining who gets access to credit, which universities are top-tier, and which cities receive the most favorable interest rates on municipal bonds. Once established as legitimate, ratings strongly influence decision-making, resource allocations, and stratification outcomes. Raters reinforce the legitimacy of their ratings by publishing the specific criteria used in their ratings. However, we do not know whether ratings actually reflect their stated criteria. Instead of providing transparency, publishing criteria may work to distract from the true elements imbued in ratings leading to misguided behavior with real social and economic consequences. In this paper, I test whether variation in city government credit ratings can be explained by the published criteria of the credit rating agency that issues the ratings. I demonstrate that city credit ratings largely do not reflect their stated criteria. In fact, city credit ratings diverge from the criteria in systematically political ways with more conservative cities receiving higher ratings regardless of their performance on the criteria. This decoupling of city credit ratings from their criteria suggests that the image of ratings as objectively grounded and legitimized by published criteria obscures the empirical reality of ratings as constructed through distinctly politically tinted lenses.
Rachel Dwyer (Committee Chair)
Timothy Bartley (Committee Member)
Vincent Roscigno (Committee Member)
Christopher Browning (Committee Member)
59 p.
Sociology
economic sociology, credit rating, bond rating, financial markets, city governments, finance, commensuration, evaluation

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Norris, D. N. (2018). A Camera Obscura? Understanding How Credit Rating Agencies See City Government [Master's thesis, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1531830251553098

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Norris, Davon. A Camera Obscura? Understanding How Credit Rating Agencies See City Government. 2018. Ohio State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1531830251553098.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Norris, Davon. "A Camera Obscura? Understanding How Credit Rating Agencies See City Government." Master's thesis, Ohio State University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1531830251553098

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1531830251553098
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.