The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has published its Annual Report 2013 (Report) on credit rating agencies (CRAs) in the European Union (EU). The Report also outlines ESMA’s supervisory work plan for this year.ESMA has found that CRAs continue to progress in how they comply...

The updated Q&A provides clarifications regarding the publication of sovereign ratings and conflict of interests concerning investments in CRAs.The purpose of this Q&A is to provide clarity on the requirements and practice in the application of the CRA Regulation and in particular, the CRA 3...

Trading Platforms (TPs), which have automated trading members, have been the focus of increased attention in recent years. ESMA therefore decided in 2013 to conduct a peer review on the Guidelines on systems and controls in an automated trading environment for trading platforms, ESMA 2012/122...

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) published a Consultation Paper on Guidelines on the information that should beperiodically submitted to ESMA by credit rating agencies (CRAs). In this Final Report, ESMA considers the responses received to the consultation paper during Q3 2014...

This paper surveys intergenerational altruism in neoclassical growth models. It first examines Barro's approach to intergenerational altruism, whereby successive generations are linked by recursive altruistic preferences. Individuals have an altruistic concern only for their children, who in...

This paper explores how discretionary fiscal policies on the revenue side of the government budget have reacted to economic fluctuations in European Union countries. For this purpose, it uses data on legislated revenue changes and structural indicators provided twice per year by National Central...

In recent years, government revenues in many EU countries experienced significant and erratic changes, which, a priori, could not be fully explained by macroeconomic developments or by discretionary fiscal policy measures. We investigate this issue by estimating “unexplained” changes in tax...

This paper investigates how expectations about future government spending affect the transmission of fiscal policy shocks. We study the effects of two different types of government spending shocks in the United States: (i) spending shocks that are accompanied by an expected reversal of public...