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 Professor Graham Barr
Qualifications and Experience
Graham Barr was first appointed to the
department in 1979 as a Lecturer, becoming a Senior Lecturer in 1981,
Associate Professor in 1984 and Professor in 1998. He did 15
undergraduate courses at UCT for a combined BA/BSc degree in 1975,
passing them all in the first class and winning six class medals. His
postgraduate degrees, BSc(Hons) (1976), MSc (1977) (Static and
Dynamic modelling of the South African economy) and PhD (1981) (A
Contribution to Adaptive Robust Estimation), were all completed at
UCT. He is a member of the South African Statistical Association and the
South African Economic Society. In 1989, jointly with Rob van den
Honert, he won the President's Gold Medal of the South African
Association of Business Management for outstanding contributions to the
South African Journal of Business Management. He has also won the
Corporate Merchant Bank Prize for the best article published in South
African Journal of Accounting Research in 1994 (with Prof. B Kantor), in
1998 (with L Sharp) and again with Prof. Kantor in 2000. He has been a
regular financial and quantitative consultant for Investec Securities
and an expert witness on several Supreme Court cases.
Research Interests
Graham Barr is primarily an applied econometrician. His research in this
area is in macroeconomic model building and leading indicator analysis;
for example, a research focus is the empirical analysis of the South
African macro-economy and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and their
relationship with international markets. In addition, he does applied
financial research in the area of portfolio analysis and asset
allocation in the South African context as well as on decision models in
financial intervention analysis. With Prof. B Kantor (frequent co-author
in this area) he made a major contribution in laying the groundwork of
empirical economics for the South African context and in the area of
Applied Finance, again in a South African context, with co-authors Prof.
J Affleck-Graves, Prof. R Knight and then with PhD students Prof. D
Bradfield and Prof. M Page, made a significant contribution to Applied
South African Finance research. His contribution has covered a large
area and includes work into the efficiency of SA markets, estimation of
optimal portfolios in SA markets, tests of CAPM and APT models and more
recently, co-integration studies of PE and Price to NAV equilibria. A
recent research focus has been the short-run analysis of the 1997-98
Asian emerging markets’ crisis and the way it impacted on the SA
economy, both as an independent entity and relative to other emerging
markets. The long-run analysis tests for the possibility of stable
long-run relationships between the macroeconomic aggregates of the SA
economy and the other emerging markets.
On a completely
different track, he is near the completion of writing a suite of
software modules for use primarily in the teaching of 1st and 2nd year
statistics modules. These are currently being used in STA1000 at UCT and
have be used in 2nd year courses from June 2005. The modules are written
in VBA (Visual Basic for applications) that is built into Microsoft
excel. These modules demonstrate, with strong use of graphics, basic
statistical concepts by using simulation and have revolutionized the
effectiveness of the teaching of Statistics at UCT. Thus, for example,
by simulating over a 1000 replications one can demonstrate the
acceptance or rejection of some null hypothesis given some (selected)
underlying distribution. This can then be used to demonstrate, for
example, the concept of the power of a test using actual data rather
than the normal theoretical exposition.
Furthermore, he has recently worked in collaboration with Prof. P
Collins in work commissioned by the National Responsible Gaming
Programme to establish:
- how familiar South Africans are with
different forms of gambling, how much they participate in them and what
their attitudes are towards gambling.
- the prevalence of problem and
pathological/addictive gambling in South Africa a baseline against to
measure future change.
Three biennial research reports have been published in 2002, 2004 and
2006. The publication is entitled " Gambling and Problem Gambling in
South Africa: A National Study 2001, 2003, 2005" and represent the core
research in the area of problem gambling in South Africa.
Recent Research projectsCorporate
Governance and the King report (NRF project 1999-2001) in collaboration
with Professor Brian Kantor. Evaluation and characterisation of SA as an
emerging market in collaboration with L Sharp (NRF project 2002-2006).
Research contacts have been established at, and consolidated by visits
to, the London Business School, Oxford University, Columbia University,
Stanford University, Australian Graduate School of Management (Sydney)
and The International Management Institute (Geneva). He is a joint
author with Professor LG Underhill of the third edition of the first
year text book for B Com. students COMMATH.
Publications, selected from 57
- Barr, G.D.I. and Kantor, B. S. (2000)
"Adding market value to a holding company", SA Journal of Accounting
Research, 14:1, 49-64
- Barr, G.D.I. & Sharp, L.S. (2002) ,
Measuring Contagion - The profile of South African and Emerging Market
Risk over the 1998 Crisis,
J.Stud.Econometrics, 2002, 26(1), 71-82.
- Barr, G.D.I & Kantor, B.S. (2002) ,
The South African Economy and its Asset Markets: An Integrated Approach,
SAJE, 70, 1, 53-77.
- Barr G.D.I.; Standish B. (2002) ,
Modelling the Economics of Gaming.
South Africa Journal of Gambling Studies, 18 (4): 371-397, Winter
2002.
- Barr, G.D.I & Kantor, B.S. (2004) , A
criterion for comparing and selecting batsmen in limited-overs cricket,
Journal of the Operational Research Society, 55, 1266-1274.
- Barr, G.D.I & Kantor, B.S. (2006) ,
The impact of the Rand on the value of the JSE, Journal of Economics
and Econometrics, 29(2), 77-95.
- Barr, G.D.I. & Sharp, L.S. (2006) ,
The Economics of democracy in Resource Producing countries, Journal
in Economics and Econometrics, 30(1), 41-58.
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