ESG Ratings, ESG News Sentiment, and Firm Credit Risk Perception

sponsorship: This work was supported by the Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (Spain) and the European Union under grant number PRE2021-099201; MCIN/AEI/10.13039/50110 0 011033 under grant numbers PID2020-114460GB-C31, PID2020-115018RB-C32, and PID2024-162262NA-I00, and the Autonomous University of Barcelona precompetitive research project under grant number PPC2025_706558. Florina Silaghi acknowledges financial support from Ramon Areces Foundation. This work was developed while Fangfang Wang was a teaching assistant at ESADE Business School and visiting PhD student at University of Zurich. (Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (Spain), European Union|PRE2021-099201, MCIN/AEI|PID2020-114460GB-C31, MCIN/AEI|PID2020-115018RB-C32, MCIN/AEI|PID2024-162262NA-I00, Autonomous University of Barcelona precompetitive research project|PPC2025_706558, Ramon Areces Foundation)