A Research Review of the Sovereign Credit Rating and the Credit Rating Agencies

The research literatures are combed from the three aspects that include the influencing factors of the sovereign rating, the impact of the sovereign rating to the financial markets, the behavior of the credit rating agencies (CRAs). Some shortcomings in the theory and research methods are pointed out in the paper. Based on literature analysis, the future research directions and key issues are outlooked. We think that the two major research direction in the future are the decision-making behavior analysis of CRAs, quality analysis of sovereign credit ratings. In addition, the key issues lie in (1) CRAs' decision- making behavior characteristics under different monopoly environment; (2) identify the key factors affect the decision- making behavior of the rating agencies and the rating quality.