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How does government licensing affect selling on online platforms? We examine the impact of China’s 2015 Food Safety Law on sellers and buyers on Alibaba, the largest e-commerce platform in that country.

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

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.

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

Emerging-market economies have become increasingly important in driving global GDP growth over the past 10 to 15 years. This has made timely and accurate assessment of current and future economic activity in emerging markets important for policy-makers not only in these countries but also in advanced economies.

We study the formation of price bubbles on experimental asset markets where cash earns interest. There are two main conclusions.

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.

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.

Growth in the Canadian economy has been essentially in line with the expectations set out in the Bank’s January Monetary Policy Report Update.

In the year just ended, the global economy faced a number of exceptional challenges, reflecting a wide range of economic, financial, and geopolitical risks and uncertainties. These included the fallout from the September 2001 terrorist attacks, corporate accounting scandals, stock market volatility, and developments in the Middle East. Despite this global backdrop, the Canadian economy outperformed virtually all other industrial economies, growing by about 3 1/4 per cent and creating 560,000 jobs, while inflation expectations remained well anchored to the Bank of Canada’s 2 per cent inflation-control target.