Sovereign Bonds and the : Does Regime Type Affect Credit Rating Agency Ratings in the Developing World?

The importance of sovereign bond ratings has grown recently as assessments by credit rating agencies (CRAs) influence the cost of capital. Understanding how CRAs determine country ratings is difficult based on the secretive nature of these agencies. Controlling for the common explanations in the literature, we use panel data and interviews to investigate the role of the democratic advantage and other determinants on bond ratings set by Moody s Investor Services, Standard and Poor s, and Fitch Ratings for fifty developing countries from 1987 to 2003. We find that regime type and most other political factors have little effect on bond raters. Instead, trade, inflation, growth, and bond default strongly affect sovereign ratings. The message for policymakers in developing countries is that factors that support bond repayment are most useful for enhancing CRA ratings.

The Pedagogical Value of Polling: A Coordinated 2012 Exit Poll Project across Diverse Classrooms

Several previous studies have demonstrated that student exit polling has educational value and promotes civic engagement (Berry and Robinson 2012, Evans and Lagergren 2007, Lelieveldt and Rossen 2009, and others). The authors of this paper have created assignments and an instructor\u27s manual on running student exit polls in undergraduate courses. Three institutions used these assignments during the fall 2012 semester. Working together, these instructors created an opportunity for their students to participate collaboratively with others in survey design and data analysis. This effort further provided assessment data on the effectiveness of this pedagogical approach for student engagement outside of the classroom in different communities and course contexts. Student surveys measured the impact that this experience had on their understanding of their own community, their relationship to the national community, their understanding of survey methodology, and descriptive statistics. Do students learn more about their community or the scientific process? Does it matter whether the course is designed primarily around politics, statistics, or public opinion? This paper addresses these questions and how these effects vary across different types of students and classrooms