Currently, with the intensification of economic and financial integration of the markets, the weakening of national borders and the significant growth of international trade, investors are increasingly directing their capital flows towards external markets in order to promote international diversification of their portfolios, reducing the risk at the same level of return to those presented by purely domestic portfolios. It is in this context of international expansion of markets and of the development of international portfolios that the information regarding the risks of each investment becomes even more important. In this sense, in order to meet these information needs, the private rating companies began to emerge as early as the twentieth century, in order to provide risk ratings regarding the issuers of securities, credit ratings. Consequently, by classifying the risk of a security, these ratings have the ability to influence the market as a whole. Thus, this study aims to investigate the impact that Brazilian sovereign rating changes by these specialized agencies have in the Brazilian stock market, specifically regarding the behavior of shares of state-owned companies, as these should supposedly be more affected than the others against sovereign risk reviews, both through the market s response as a whole and by the fact that the perception of risk by their majority shareholder is directly altered by these ratings. To this end, an event study is conducted to analyze the effects seen on market returns (IBOVESPA) and state enterprises, in periods of downgrade and upgrade.