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.Barter, Business Cycles, Error Correction Model, Box-Jenkins ARMA

Implementation of video feedback to assist the learning of presentation skills

This paper describes the implementation of an online video resource for both postgraduate and undergraduate students with the aim to improve the learning of presentation skills. As part of the final year project in this last academic year, presentations were recorded at the start of the second semester. These were then made available to the students during week eight of the semester over the web via student specific portal pages. The student's marks and feedback from the lecture assessors on the presentations were also made available. The students were also recorded during their final presentations at the end of the semester. The changes in student grades were examined and compared to those over the previous six years when such feedback was not available. The resource was also designed to aid lecturers to view presentations they may have missed and enter marks for their allocated students