Barter and Business Cycles: A Comment and Further Empirical Evidence

The purpose of this comment is a critical evaluation of the empirical analysis made by Cresti (2005) and her finding that commercial barter behaves differently than corporate barter during the course of business cycles. Here, we correct the arbitrary replacement of the missing observations by filling them with forecasts using the Box-Jenkins ARMA and Kalman filter methods before performing the unit root and cointegration tests. Although the ECM estimates for various measures of business cycle are occasionally inconsistent, overall the inventory measures and capacity utilization results suggest that barter transactions are counter-cyclical regardless of the size of the business. Additionally, we find that barter rises with inflationary trend, dissemination of access to computer technology, tax rates and tax laws requiring disclosure of barter transactions.