Barter and Business Cycles: Further Empirical Evidence

Abstract

Rising interest in barter due to the current world-wide recession has motivated a re-examination of macroeconomic determinants of barter in the U.S. economy, particularly its correlation with the business cycle. This critical evaluation, using the International Reciprocal Trade Association data, addresses, among other issues, whether firm size affect the behavior of firms during business cycles. Here, we deal with 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 cycles are occasionally inconsistent, overall the inventory measures and capacity utilization results suggest that barter transactions are counter-cyclical regardless of the firm size. 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.