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This paper analyzes the determinants of the ratings and rankings of Economics departments generated in a recent reputational study by the National Research Council. A department's reputation increases with the number of article pages published and the citation rate for its faculty's publications. A page in a "top five" journal is worth more than a page published in other journals. There are diminishing returns to pages published and to citations. The National Research Council ratings for private institutions are biased upwards and those for southern schools are biased downwards. A revised set of rankings with these biases removed is constructed. The optimum publication strategy for a department depends on the distribution of pages published between "top five" and other journals. Economists judged departments more harshly than faculty in other disciplines.

The recent level of unemployment may affect the natural rate of unemployment. The implications of such an hysteresis effect for macroeconomic fluctuations is analyzed using a stochastic dynamic model. The greater the importance of an hysteresis effect, the more pronounced are fluctuations in unemployment and inflation. Complete hysteresis causes the economy to be unstable.

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.

Abstract.  This paper deals with a reassessment of the money–income relation and predictability of changes in GDP with innovations in money in the presence of barter. Organized barter as a method of transaction, through barter exchanges, has been growing rapidly in the US economy. With the introduction of computers and the use of a credit system which allows non‐simultaneous transactions, barter exchanges have found new opportunities to offer an alternative to monetary transactions. Analysis of data from the 1974–96 period provides some evidence suggesting that inclusion of barter in the output function improves the marginal predictability of money.

This paper extends the work of Barro (1979), Eisner (1992), foines (1991), Sawhney and DiPietro (1994), and others and examines whether an optimal debt ratio exists that will maximize economic growth. The growth rate of real GDP is specified as a function of the debt ratio, the debt ratio squared, the growth rates of labor employment, capital services, money stock, and a trend variable. The sample ranges from 1960 to 1991. Hypothesis tests show that economic growth and its determinants, including the debt ratio are cointegrated and have a long‐run stable relationship. Results also indicate that the optimal debt ratio is 38.4 percent for debt held by the public and 48.9 percent for total debt. Thus, the current (1993) debt ratios of 50.9 percent for the debt held by the public and 68.2 percent for total debt are far greater than the desirable levels.