Vessel charter as the supply side of the container shipping industry: main market characteristics and dynamics in times of uncertainty

Description

Container shipping is a two-tiered industry, where vessel operators offer their transport service on regular basis with several port calls en route and a fixed schedule to shippers. To deliver such a regular transport service, they employ fully owned vessels or charter them from others like non-operating vessel owners on the charter market.
Taking micro data in form of containers fixtures reported from Clarkson Shipping Intelligence (SIN) Database (https://sin.clarksons.net/), the importance of repetition, status (relational mechanisms) and geographical proximity (proximity mechanisms) change over time is explored in this market before and after the financial crisis of 2008 effecting primary uncertainty there. More specifically, our sample includes 2,716 charter fixtures split in two symmetrical periods (2005-2008 and 2008-2011) resulting in 26,747 observations of potential dyads of vessel owners and operators chartering vessels. With these dyads taken as a binary dependent variable, a logit modelling framework with multi-level error clustering and controlling for bankruptcies, mergers, acquisitions of players provides quite robust results as follows: (1) charter fixtures are closed upon price, vessel characteristics and size, (2) in times of uncertainty, container fixtures tend to be closed based on relational mechanisms, especially repetitive ones that enhance exclusivity and (3) status and geographical proximity does not matter at.

Period	6 Feb 2020
Event title	PhD Seminar Politecnico di Milano
Event type	Unknown