"Those people in the CompStat era felt enormous pressure to downgrade index crime, which determines the crime rate, and at the same time they felt less pressure to maintain the integrity of the crime statistics," said John A. Eterno, one of the researchers and a retired New York City police captain.
The two travel companies were the biggest fallers in the leading index following downgrades on both companies from Morgan Stanley.
(While I was in South Africa last month, Transparency International, which rates countries based on an index of corruption, downgraded the country to the 69th most-honest place to do business. It had been 64th).
This included 28 cases whose original index biopsy was downgraded by the panel but who had a subsequent biopsy that met all eligibility criteria.
On Tuesday, Greece became the first developed nation since 2007 to be downgraded to emerging-market status by index provider MSCI.
The yen weakened briefly against the dollar after the rating downgrade was announced, but the Nikkei stock index of 225 issues ended up 1.32percenttodayand and bond prices also rose slightly.
Already the US has been downgraded in The Economist's Democracy Index, from a score of 8.22 in 2006 to 7.98 in 2016, pushing the US into the "flawed democracy" category.
And the attractiveness of the UK's renewable energy sector to inward investors was downgraded in the respected Ernst and Young country attractiveness index.
The broader Standard & Poor's was up 5 points, or 0.3%, to 1,452, while the tech-driven Nasdaq gained 4 points, or 0.2%, to 2,614, a day after downgrades to the seminconductor sector battered the index.
In our study, 29% of potential cases – all of whom were later diagnosed with carcinoma – had index biopsies that the panel downgraded to negative.
