Industrial Bonds and the Rating Process

?Professor Belkaoui's book provides many interesting insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the somewhat secretive process of rating bonds and its subsequent relationship to financial analysis. He surveys the literature on bond rating models and the various financial variables and statistical approaches used to develop them. The author designs his own model, based on multivariate analysis, with the intention of compensating for some of the shortcomings in the rating processes of Standard and Poor's, Moody's and others (particularly their diversity in approach and lack of economic rationale for selecting variables for analysis). This book is somewhat difficult reading due to its highly technical subject matter but will be of interest to investors, financial advisers and the academic community.?-Journal of Accountancy