This study employs a competing risks approach to examine the rating migrations of US financial institutions (FIs) during the period 1984–2006. It finds that downgrades to alternative major rating categories require separate models, while upgrades can be treated as equivalent in the same analysis. Different downgrade routes exhibit different within-rating heterogeneity and time heterogeneity. The effect of rating history persists, and for downgrades to speculative ratings it becomes stronger as controls for outlooks/CreditWatch are added. The rating history, macroeconomic and political cycles jointly exhibit discrimination accuracy in predicting the outcomes of rating changes during the holdout-crisis period (2007–10). In most cases, adding the current rating, outlook or CreditWatch does not substantially improve the forecast performance of the models out-of-sample.

中文翻译：

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美国金融机构评级迁移：不同结果是否等价？

本研究采用竞争风险方法来检验 1984 年至 2006 年期间美国金融机构 (FI) 的评级迁移。它发现降级到替代主要评级类别需要单独的模型，而在同一分析中可以将升级视为等效。不同的降级路线表现出不同的评级内异质性和时间异质性。评级历史的影响持续存在，并且随着对前景/信用观察的控制增加，对投机评级的降级影响变得更强。评级历史、宏观经济和政治周期共同表现出在预测危机期间（2007-10 年）评级变化结果方面的歧视准确性。在大多数情况下，添加当前评级，