TY  - JOUR
AU  - Flandreau,Marc
AU  - Flores,Juan H.
AU  - Gaillard,Norbert
AU  - Nieto-Parra,Sebastián
TI  - The End of Gatekeeping: Underwriters and the Quality of Sovereign Bond Markets, 1815-2007
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 15128
PY  - 2009
Y2  - July 2009
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15128
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15128.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Marc Flandreau
The Graduate Institute
P.O. Box 136 
1211 Geneva 21, Switzerland
E-Mail: marc.flandreau@graduateinstitute.ch

Juan H. Flores
Department of Economic History
University of Geneva
40, bd du Pont-d’Arve,
CH-1211 Geneva 4, Switzerland
E-Mail: juan.flores@unige.ch

Norbert Gaillard
Sciences Po
27 rue Saint Guillaume
75007 Paris, France
E-Mail: norbert.gaillard@sciences-po.org

Sebastian Nieto-Parra
Development Centre
OECD
2, rue André-Pascal
75775 Paris Cedex 16, France
E-Mail: sebastian.nietoparra@oecd.org
M1  - published as Marc Flandreau, Juan H. Flores, Norbert Gaillard, Sebastián Nieto-Parra. "The End of Gatekeeping: Underwriters and the Quality of Sovereign Bond Markets, 1815-2007," in Lucrezia Reichlin and Kenneth West, organizers, "NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics 2009" University of Chicago Press (2010)

M3  - presented at "ISOM", June 12-13, 2009
AB  - We provide a comparison of salient organizational features of primary markets for foreign government debt over the very long run. We focus on output, quality control, information provision, competition, pricing, charging, and signaling. We find that the market setup experienced a radical transformation in the recent period, and we interpret this as resulting from the rise of liability insurance provided by rating agencies. Underwriters have given up their former role as gatekeepers of liquidity and certification agencies to become aggressive competitors in a new Speculative Grade market.
ER  -