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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.

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

In the April Monetary Policy Report, the Bank noted that inflation was well above its 2 per cent target and that short-term inflation expectations had edged up.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, there is interest in reforming bank regulation such that capital requirements are more closely linked to a bank's contribution to the overall risk of the financial system. In our paper we compare alternative mechanisms for allocating the overall risk of a banking system to its member banks.

In this paper known results about the equivalence of state space and autoregressive moving-average models with exogenous inputs (ARMAX) (including vector auto-regressive or VAR models) are reviewed. While most of these results are not new, no single reference appears to bring together several important related points.

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.

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.

Under bond-rate transmission of monetary policy, the authors show that a generalized Taylor Principle applies, in which the average anticipated path of policy responses to inflation is subject to a lower bound of unity. This result helps explain how bond rates may exhibit stable responses to inflation, even in periods of passive policy.

Since the last Report, the Canadian economy has advanced broadly in line with expectations.