i.To critically analyze the corporate social responsibility activities in credit rating agencies before and after a financial crisis.ii.To determine the strategies established by credit rating agencies in the management of a financial crisis.Literature Review and Overview Several financial crises have occurred, and explorers such as Bayar (2014) are concerned with the role and impact of reactions of CRAs. According to Bayar (2014), CRAs have four major roles they must perform and they include offering a common standard for market participants referring to credit risks; improving financial markets functioning and efficiency, providing global ratings that are consistent and solving asymmetry of information existing between the investors and issuers. Similarly, White (2018) argues that CRAs should provide favourable ratings for corporate organizations. Moreover, White (2018) states that, in spite of the several critics of key CRAs, Standards & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch use the same financial instruments in both Europe and the U.S. On the other hand, Kiesel (2016) argues that after the global financial crisis, there has been an increased focus and assessment of the significance of CRAs. Most of the financial stakeholders agree that the CRAs could not detect the decrease in the credit quality of the issuers within the required time (Kiesel). Therefore, the role of CRAs needs to be investigated to estimate the impact of their reactions in financial markets.Research Method This study will employ a mixed research methodology by using both quantitative and qualitative data. According to McCusker and Gunaydin (2015), the selection of a suitable method is based on the nature of the study. Mixed research methods offer the researcher an opportunity to gather sufficient numerical and non-numerical
information to answer complicated research questions extensively (McCusker and Gunaydin 5). Quantitative data that will be collected and analysed in this study includes the stock market responses to changes in the ratings, credit default swaps during and after the global financial crisis from a sample of major CRAs. On the other hand, the study employs qualitative techniques to gather descriptive information about the role of CRAs, their corporate social responsibility and responses made by CRAs following the impacts of the financial crisis.Project Plan Bullet Points
i.Research proposal
ii.Design of the project timeline.
iii.Identifying the data sources
iv.Literature review chapter
v.Data collection
vi.Data analysis
vii.Conclusion.
viii.Reference
