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There have been a number of significant economic and financial developments since the time of the July Monetary Policy Report Update.

Six months ago, at the time of the last Monetary Policy Report, the global economic and financial environment was volatile and highly uncertain because of the adverse situation in Asia and the fallout from the Russian debt moratorium.

The year that just passed posed many challenges for all Canadians. The slowdown in the global economy became more pronounced as the year went on, and this affected households, businesses, and governments alike. The tragedy of 11 September compounded the economic difficulties and issues facing us all. Through this period of rapidly changing circumstances, the Bank met its responsibilities by responding quickly and vigorously to events in order to underpin confidence and support the economy.

The global economy has continued to grow at a robust pace since the July Monetary Policy Report Update.

The exponential family, relative entropy, and distortion are methods of transforming probability distributions. We establish a link between those methods, focusing on the relation between relative entropy and distortion.

This is the second in a series of semi-annual reports designed to increase the transparency and understanding of Canadian monetary policy.

Salespeople are widely employed in many industries. We leverage a unique data set on retail sales from a leading Chinese cold-drink manufacturer and information on the firm’s salespeople assignment rule to measure the causal effect of salespeople on product revenue.

The Canadian economy continues to grow at a solid pace, consistent with the Bank’s outlook in the January Monetary Policy Report Update.

At the time of last November’s Monetary Policy Report, two issues dominated the analysis: the global economic slowdown and the fallout from the September terrorist attacks.

We study how the distribution of information supply by the news media affects the macroeconomy. We find that media coverage focuses particularly on the largest firms, and that firms’ equity financing and investment increase after media coverage. But these equity and investment responses are largest among small, rarely covered firms. Our quantitative studies highlight that the aggregate effects of media coverage depend crucially on how that coverage is allocated.